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NARRATIVE AUTHORITY IN THE JAMESIAN CENTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
By
S. Selina Jamil

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1997

ABSTRACT
NARRATIVE AUTHORITY IN THE JAMESIAN CENTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
By
S. Selina Jamil

Much critical attention has been devoted to the Jamesian centers of consciousness
as watchers or readers and " artists, " but not to their speciﬁc activity of reading and telling
stories about their surroundings and about themselves with their wondering, interpretive,
and creative imagination. Because the Jamesian reﬂectors are readers and tellers of stories,
they create meaning, experience perceptual growth, and develop representational skills,
and thus exert narrative authority. This project is a study of Henry J ames's portrayal of
narrative authority through his technique of the center of consciousness as embodied by
the reﬂector characters of In the Cage, "The Jolly Corner, " The Golden Bowl, and The
Ambassadors. As readers of stories the reﬂectors make narrative connections, and
consequently engage themselves in a struggle to create epistemological patterns, which
continue to grow just as their imagination continues to grow. In the Cage reveals how the
imaginative reﬂector, although she does not grow to become a successful storyteller,
grows to be an acute reader of stories, for she ultimately frees herself from an involvement
with sentimental narratives, and thus creates mental reﬁnement for herself. "The Jolly
Corner," The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors, reveal how the reﬂectors' imaginative
growth enables these readers of stories to become ﬁgurative storytellers who at some
point watch their environment ﬁ'om their house of ﬁction through their interpretive
imagination and create their relation with that environment. As a result of his exertion of
narrative authority, Brydon ultimately ﬁnds self-ﬁrlﬁllment through his aesthetic quest;
Maggie changes an old story into a new one, and helps Amerigo to make use of his own

interpretive imagination; and Strether, whose changing and growing imaginative

consciousness enables him to understand that there is nothing ﬁnal or stable within
himself; ﬁnds the narrative connection between his past, present and ﬁxture. And although
these reﬂectors' systems of representation are often indistinguishable from those of the
third-person narrators of these works of ﬁction, as successful storytellers they create vivid
and well-developed images which ultimately reveal their imaginative sophistication and

independence ﬁom the narrators.

COPyright by
S. Selina Jamil
1997

To Raj and Angshoo.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would never have been completed without the guidance, patience, and
understanding of my advisor, Dr. Sheila Teahan. Her questions and comments, and
therefore, all her suggestions have been invaluable during the entire process of my writing
of this dissertation. She has read every word I have written for this project with such
diligence and thoroughness, such insight and acuteness, that I shall forever be grateful to
her. I would also like to thank Dr. Douglas Peterson, Dr. Barry Gross, Dr. Stephen Arch,
and Dr. Kathleen Rout for reading my dissertation and discussing it with me, and also for

being helpful and supportive.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Chapter 1. In the Cage of Commonness

Chapter 2. Spencer Brydon's Aesthetic Quest in the
”Human Actual Social" World

Chapter 3. The Changing of Old Stories in
Iheﬁnldmﬁmyl

Chapter 4. The Changing Imaginative Consciousness
of Lambert Strether

Conclusion

Bibliography

Vii

19

60

100

152

194

197

INTRODUCTION

This project examines Henry James's portrayal of narrative authority in In the
Cage, "The Jolly Comer, " The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors through his technique
of the center of consciousness. In his prefaces, collected together in The Art of the Novel,
James discusses his method of approaching the subject-matter within his ﬁction not
through an omniscient narrator but through characters who embody centers of
consciousness. For the center of consciousness, as James conceives it, is the "centre" from
which the "subject" of each of his narratives is "treated," and therefore it is "a principle of
composition" that makes the stories "hang together."1 As he mentions in the preface to
The Golden Bowl, J arnes presents "an imagined observer's, a projected, charmed painter's
or poet‘s" view or impression because he does not care for the "muﬁled majesty of
irresponsible 'authorship,'" that is, for the authority displayed by an omniscient narrator,
the power that stays beyond the realm of the ﬁction but that makes mere puppets of the
characters within the ﬁction (AN 328). As a responsible author he is mindful, as he points
out in another preface, of "the art of guiding [the subject] with consequent authority -
since this sense of 'authority' is for the master-builder the treasure of treasures" (AN
328,123). As the storyteller he is the "master-builder"2 who guides the subjects of his
narratives and authorizes the centers of consciousness, his "deput[ies] or delegate[s]," as
he describes them in the preface to The Golden Bowl, with the task of carrying out the
work of constructing the narratives, as it were (AN 327). Thus the "consequent" and
therefore responsible authority he ﬁnds himself exerting as the "master-builder," and that
he delegates his centers of consciousness to exert by allowing the action to be seen from

their points of view (although it is recorded in third-person narration), is narrative

2

authority. Vivienne Rundle argues that "James contrives to regain mastery" through the
prefaces over his novels in which, by claiming "to share narrative authority with his
characters" and staging "his own disappearance ﬁ'om the narrative system, [and] allowing
the reader to assume substantial authority over the text," he stages "a drama of authorial
abdication".3 But as Mark Seltzer, who argues that "the art of the novel is an art of
power," observes, "James's organic principle of composition allows for a recession of
narrative authority and makes for a dispersal of narrative control that is nonetheless
immanent in every movement and gesture of character and plot."4 As I see the question of
James's narrative authority, because his centers of consciousness are cast in the likeness of
James,5 that is, they ﬁrnction in ways that remind us of the James who describes himself as
author in the Prefaces, he does not show an abdication but rather an assertion of narrative
authority by "dispers[ing]" it through the characters who represent the centers of
consciousness. To share narrative authority with his characters is not to "abdicat[e]" it but,
as a reading of the preface to The Golden Bowl suggests, a manner in which the
"impersonal author[]" reveals it through imaginary but "concrete" characters (AN 327).

J arnes describes these characters as "mirrors" and "intense perceivers," in The Art
of the Novel (AN 70,71). Thus what is signiﬁcant in The Ambassadors for the author, as
he writes in the preface to that novel, is that Strether, the protagonist who embodies the
center of consciousness in that novel, and who suﬁ‘ers from a sense of not having ”live[d]"
his life, "now at all events sees; so that the business of my tale and the march of my action,
not to say the precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration of this process of
vision" (AN 308). Because they are acute watchers, who are "burnished by the
intelligence, the curiosity, the passion, the force of the moment, " James makes his
protagonists "registers or 'reﬂectors'" (AN 300). The intensity of the drama within his
ﬁction, then, even for James himself comes from the changing and growing, thinking and
feeling, contemplative and interpretive intelligence of his ﬁctive characters who register

and reﬂect the action: "I confess I never see the leading interest of any human hazard but

3

in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and moving creature) subject to ﬁne
intensiﬁcation and wide enlargement. It is as mirrored in that consciousness that the gross
fools, the headlong fools, the fatal fools play their part for us - they have much less to
show us in themselves" (AN 67). And as James writes in the preface to The Ambassadors,
"Art deals with what we see" (AN 312). Consequently, much critical attention has been
devoted to James's technique of the center of consciousness and its ability to see or
interpret.

As Laurence Holland argues, the central intelligence takes part in "observing the
action and constructing its image" with the author.6 And although Tony Tanner does not
mention the center of consciousness, he also discusses the speculative activity performed
by the Jamesian spectator. Both Holland and Tanner, then, are concerned with the artistic
activity in which the Jamesian observer is involved. Also, like Holland, Tanner is
concerned with the price that the Jamesian spectator pays for his or her vision. While
Holland discusses the "sacriﬁce that at once measures and becomes the expense of
vision, "6 Tanner discusses the "exclusion from participation" that the Jamesian spectator
pays for his or her vision.7 Ora Sega], who is also concerned with the center of
consciousness embodied by the Jamesian observer, and the "authorial functions" fulﬁlled
by this ﬁctive character, argues that seeing does not lead the Jamesian observer to a
vicarious but rather to an " authentic" form of being. 8 And Carolyn Porter, who discusses
the artist in the J arnesian watcher as an embodiment of the center of consciousness as well,
argues that the seer is a complicit participant in the events he or she observes.9 My own
project, which grows from such readings of the authorial role played by the reﬂectors, and
thus from the questions of losses and gains encountered by the reﬂectors that these
readings raise, however, is concerned with the reﬂectors' ability to exert narrative
authority as a result of their ability to observe and interpret, and thus to make meaning.

Thus my reading of James's ﬁction has also grown out of Paul Armstrong's

discussion of the epistemological implications of "the composing powers of

4

consciousness". 10 Armstrong focuses on James's portrayal of consciousness because
"consciousness is the activity of making and interpreting meaning". 10 Further, my reading
has also grown out of Sharon Cameron's discussion of what consciousness achieves in the
novels, for example, of how it determines meanings, and of the "tension between the
empowering of consciousness and the disrupting of that power". 11 Picking up the
thread of the consciousness's power to compose or determine meanings from these
arguments, my own exploration of the meaning-making activities of James's centers of
consciousness has taken me to a study of the reﬂectors' exertion of narrative control by
way of their perceptual quest, which originates in their imaginative faculty.

For it is the imaginative faculty that the center of consciousness uses to interpret
meanings. As I see J ames's portrayal of the imagination, meanings cannot be interpreted
without the help of the imaginative faculty because it is the imagination which makes the
center of consciousness see. For Daniel Mark Fogel, J ames's concept of "vision" involves
"the imagination as much as the eye," and it is "a power of discrimination" as well as "a
moral process". Fogel also maintains that Strether is "giﬁed with a Coleridgean secondary
imagination".12 On the other hand, William Goetz, in his reading of James, associates the
imagination not simply with triumphs but also with failures: "the imaginative life triumphs
in the production of a world ﬁrll of artistic meaning and [encounters] failures when it
confronts another world outside of its imaginative orbit". 13 But as I see James's portrayal
of the imaginative faculty, although it may not necessarily lead the centers of
consciousness to a synthetic vision, it certainly is not the cause of any of their failures. As
James writes in the preface to The Ambassadors, it is Strether's "blest imagination" that
helps him "to discriminate" (AN 316). For James, then, it is not the rational but the
imaginative faculty that plays the most signiﬁcant role in producing analytical activity. And
as he writes in the preface to In the Cage in regards to the wondering imagination of the
telegraphist, the center of consciousness in that novella, it is the "imagination" that

"continues to abound in questions and to supply answers to as many of them as possible"

5

(AN 155). Consequently, even the imagination of the "little," nameless, "brooding
telegraphist" is endowed with epistemological concerns (AN 156). Thus the dramatic
intensity of this novella, too, comes from the center of consciousness's interpretive
imagination: "The action of the drama is simply the girl's 'subjective' adventure - that of
her quite deﬁnitely winged intelligence" (AN 157). Thus not only has James endowed his
ﬁctive protagonists with a vivid imagination, but, in the preface to The Golden Bowl, he
even calls the center of consciousness "a convenient substitute for the [author's]
creative power otherwise so veiled and disembodied" (AN 327).

As I see these centers of consciousness, characters who represent the "veiled and
disembodied" "creative" faculty of the storyteller's imagination, a signiﬁcant manner in
which they exert their narrative authority is by reading stories about the people around
them and about themselves with the help of their acute imagination. It is with her
imagination that the telegraphist "guess[es] all sorts of impossible things" and creates
"theories and interpretations" which become evident in her "read[ing] into the immensity
of [upper class people's telegraphic] intercourse stories and meanings without end. " 14
These may hardly have any accuracy, as James ironically suggests in the novella, but her
reading of stories is still signiﬁcant because it ultimately enables her to broaden her
imagination, and consequently to move beyond the desire to read sentimental narratives.
The centers of consciousness's ability to watch, and thus read, is inseparably connected
with their ability to imagine, for what they use is an interpretive imagination. And their
ability to imagine interpretations, and thus create meaning, makes them acute readers of
stories. To read stories, then, is to make meaning. This is why James refers to his
designated centers of consciousness of the ﬁrst and second volumes in The Golden Bowl,
Prince Amerigo and Maggie Verver respectively, as "the admirably endowed pair [who]
point for me the moral of the endless interest, endless worth for 'delight,’ of the
compositional contribution" (AN 329). Indeed, the J arnesian spectators who embody the

central intelligence make a kind of "compositional contribution" as acute readers of stories

6

because of their intensely active imagination. This is why, in the preface to "The Jolly
Corner," James writes of the protagonist who embodies the center of consciousness in the
tale, Spencer Brydon, that the "thickness" of the appeal to "mystiﬁcation" is in the
consciousness that "ampliﬁes" even as it interprets it (AN 256). Thus I argue that it is
because of their activity as readers of stories that the centers of consciousness experience
perceptual growth, and thus the characters who embody the central intelligence become
acute readers of the situations which they undertake to read. In The Ambassadors,
Strether not only reads volumes of French literature, but as a result of his desire to
comprehend the world of Parisian values, he is well able to read stories in the incidents of
the lives of his ﬁiends, and of his own. For example he learns to read Chad Newsome's
" story, " not as authored by Mrs. Newsome, but the one that he ﬁnds as a result of his own
observations and interpretations. 15 And in The Golden Bowl, the Italian Prince Amerigo
has even read not simply American ﬁction, including Poe's "story of the shipwrecked
Gordon Pym," but is able to draw connections between this story and certain events of his
own life. Consequently, on observing the golden bowl in a Bloomsbury antique-dealer’s
shop, he even listens to or reads the "story" of the crystal bowl. 16 And Maggie Verver,
who has even "read stories of the wild west," knows how to ironically relate one of the
stock features of this genre to an episode in her own life (540). Because these imaginative
reﬂectors read stories in the situations they observe, they are able to create meanings, for
example, to create purpose, and causal connections, in those situations.

For to read a story, as James shows it through his centers of consciousness, is to
learn to make narrative connections between events, that is, between their interpretations
of those events. This is why James ponders the signiﬁcance of "connexion" or "relation" in
The Art of the Novel: "We are shut up wholly to cross-relations, relations all within the
action itself; no part of which is related to anything but some other part - save of course
by the relation of the total life" (114). And in the preface to The Ambassadors, he writes:
"one's bag of adventures has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of one's story. It

7

depends so on what one means by that equivocal quantity. There is the story of one's hero,
and then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself" (AN
313). Clearly, James, the storyteller, is much intrigued by "that equivocal quantity" known
as "story". And although much critical attention has been devoted to the centers of
consciousness as "artists" and as watchers or readers, not much has been devoted to their
preoccupation with reading stories, and therefore to the signiﬁcance of the "story" within
the story for James. Just as there is "the story" within the story in the sense of its origin, so
there is "the story" within the story in the sense of the stories that the reﬂectors read. And
what the Jamesian reﬂectors' ability to read stories signiﬁes is their ability to forge
connections. Thus it is for Strether "to establish and carry on" other characters'
"coherency" and "relation" to the main action (AN 317). Indeed, to make narrative
connections is to work for the creation of coherent epistemological patterns. For it is ﬁ'om
the center of consciousness that the narrative takes its "pattern" (AN 320). This then is
why James writes in the concluding sentence of The Art of the Novel (in the preface to The
Golden Bowl), "connexions are employable for ﬁner purposes than mere gaping
contrition," that is, than the fear of breaking the accepted literary codes or set of critical
rules (AN 348). Clearly, these "ﬁner purposes" are associated with the creation of
epistemological patterns, patterns which may not be completed, but through which the
imaginative consciousness creates meanings.

As James is well aware, these epistemological patterns are never complete. For, as
he writes in "The Art of Fiction," "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it
is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the ﬁnest silken threads suspended
in the chamber of consciousness".17 And as "experience consists of impressions," and
therefore, as "impressions are experience," 1 7 the "huge spider-web of the ﬁnest silken
threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness," which constitutes "Experience," is
the never-completed epistemological design (made out of a continual ﬂow of

"impressions,") that the Jamesian reﬂector or register is forever engaged in creating. For

8

example, Strether's continually evolving imagination creates continually evolving
epistemological patterns. Thus even for himself Strether's imagination is associated with
"the growing rose of observation" (3 97, my emphasis). It has not ﬁnished "growing" and
therefore the epistemological pattern it creates continues to develop coherence. This is
why for James, "the continuity of things is the whole matter," as he writes in The Art of
the Novel (5). The "canvas of life" has a "vast expanse of surface, [a] boundless number
of distinct perforations" and the "embroiderer" makes his "many-coloured ﬂowers and
ﬁgures to cover and consumeas many as possible of the little holes" with his "needle"
(AN 5, my emphases). Consequently, James points out that as there is no end to confusion
or chaos ("perforations" or "holes"), so there is no prearranged design or set of numbers
for the metaphorically embroidered ﬂowers with which the storyteller creates an
epistemological pattern. The metaphorical embroidery of ﬂowers, then, never ends.

Thus these epistemological patterns, and therefore J arnes's concern for "the close
consistency in which parts hang together even as the interweavings of a tapestry," do not
indicate obliviousness of the break of consistency within the narrative on his part (AN
139). In the preface to The Ambassadors, James refers to his understanding of a
"complete" scene as having "logical start, logical turn, and logical ﬁnish" (AN 323). As J.
Hillis Miller claims, to maintain a line of logic without a break in the line is out of the
question,18 and James's use of the phrase "logical turn" (my emphasis) instead of "logical
midpoint" or "growth" indicates his awareness that to maintain an unbroken scenic
consistency, and therefore an undisturbed line of continuity of thematic order and unity of
purpose is neither possible nor desirable. For an unbroken consistency takes away the
dramatic complexities, "the thrilling ups and downs, the intricate ins and outs of the
compositional problem" (AN 319). Thus the line of logic "turn[s]" and breaks up an
undeviating forward movement. And such a "turn" is itself paradoxically "logical" because
it shows the center of consciousness, from whom the whole subject-matter takes its

"pattern," as a groping mind to which James's readers can relate. Thus in another preface

9

he writes, "to be too acute would have disconnected [the consciousness] and made it
superhuman: the beautiful little problem was to keep it connected, connected intimately,
with the general human exposure, and thereby bedirnmed and befooled and bewildered,
anxious, restless, fallible, and yet to endow it with such intelligence that the appearances
reﬂected in it, and constituting together there the situation and the 'story,’ should become
by that fact intelligible" (AN 16). In short, just as the reﬂectors make intense perceptions,
so they make intense mistakes. Thus Strether’s growth as a contemplative, imaginative
observer, for example, is not consistent, that is, he does not consistently move forward: he
moves through "winding passages, through alternations of darkness and light" (AN 316).

It is this struggle through these metaphorical "passages" with the aim to create
epistemological patterns that makes Strether, like other Jamesian spectators who ﬁnd
themselves perched in a ﬁgurative house of ﬁction, a storyteller, as it were. James
describes "the consciousness of the artist" as "the watcher" who observes the "human
scene" from "a pierced aperture," which is "at the best" one of the "windows perched
aloft" in the metaphorical "house of ﬁction," which does not have any "hinged doors" to
connect the artist directly with "life" (AN 46). Thus James describes the storyteller in
himself; in another preface, as "being reduced to watching" the subject-matter through the
"windows of other people's interest" in it, for he is the author whose "instinct everywhere
[is] for the indirect presentation of his main image" (AN 306). The consciousness itself,
for James then, is a metaphorical window, a window that signiﬁes his interpretive and thus
creative imagination. Like the "master-builder" who literally composes narratives, his
deputies, for example, Strether, Maggie, and Brydon, look out from an aperture in the
metaphorical "house of ﬁction" and compose ﬁgurative narratives as they interpret "the
human scene" in their own particular ways: "[T]he affair of the painter is not the
immediate, it is the reﬂected ﬁeld of life, the realm not of application but of appreciation
My report of people's experience - my report as the 'story-teller' - is essentially my

appreciation of it" (AN 65). The storyteller, then, depends on his interpretive imagination

10

not only to be a reader of stories but, consequently, to be a creative composer of
narratives. My reading of the narrative concerns of the center of consciousness has grown
out of Sheila Teahan's argument that in The Golden Bowl, Maggie translates as she
constructs Amerigo's and Charlotte's consciousness, and in effect becomes a J amesian
narrator. 19 And it has also grown ﬁ'om Millicent Bell's argument that "[t]he labors of the
Jamesian consciousness are narratological."20 But for Bell, these labors lead only to
partial success with regard to the arrangement of events to make a story and with regard
to "the discovery of meaning in this story."20 As I read "The Jolly Corner," The Golden
Bowl, and The Ambassadors, just as the reﬂectors read stories in their surroundings, that
is, as they watch their surroundings, so they compose little stories successﬁrlly, although
they do not literally write them. For, as James writes in a preface, "[t]he teller of a story is
primarily the listener to it, the reader of it, too" (AN 63). The "listener" or "reader,"
develops into the composer of "teller" of stories as the center of consciousness's
imagination continues to grow in reﬁnement.

To some extent, then, my reading of the center of consciousness as a storyteller
has also grown out of Carren Kaston's argument that Maggie Verver is the character of
consciousness who launches into "independent ﬁction-making," that is, into creating
design in the materials of her life, and thus living her own ﬁction, because she possesses
the J amesian "imagination in predominance".21 But as I see the central consciousness's
involvement with stories, the absence of "imagination in predominance" does not prevent
the reﬂectors ﬁ'om composing stories, for they possess "imagination galore" (AN 310).
Nor do I see James as conceiving any of his centers of consciousness as having
"imagination in predominance": "So particular a luxury - some occasion, that is, for study
of the high gift in supreme command of a case of a career - would still doubtless come on
the day I should be ready to pay for it" (AN 310). As James wrote the prefaces after he
wrote The Golden Bowl, it is obvious that he did not conceive Maggie as having

"imagination in predominance". For what is signiﬁcant to J arnes is the drama of the

11

imaginative consciousness's struggle to compose a design, and therefore a tortuous
journey rather than a straightforward progess, and the question of the dramatic struggle
to create a design does not arise for a character whose imagination is in predominance or
in supreme command. As the J arnesian reﬂectors possess "imagination galore," they are
equipped to become "register[s] of impressions" (AN 142). Consequently the action is
reﬂected by (contemplated), and therefore reﬂected through (mirrored, imaged), the
centers of consciousness.

The centers of consciousness, then, seem to present their impressions through
images. James's "irrepressible ideal," that is, his goal as storyteller, he writes in the preface
to The Golden Bowl, is "the process and the eﬁ‘ect of representation" (AN 328). Thus he
calls the storyteller a "painter of life, " and states that "the most interesting question the
artist has to consider" is how to "give the image and the sense of certain things" (AN 14).
And as he writes in the preface to The Golden Bowl, "The essence of any representational
work is of course to bristle with immediate images" (AN 331). I argue‘that James's
reﬂectors, who are acute readers of stories, then, usually develop into tellers of stories
because of their ability to compose vivid and well-developed pictures. My reading has
partly gown out of Edgar Dryden's discussion of "the painted image" as "James's model
for his idea of representation": "Representation is a constructive, interpretive act that
derives from an 'irnpression of life'".22 Extending Dryden's observation about James to the
reﬂector, I see this interpreting center of consciousness as developing a story out of a
picture, for it is "a picture," J arnes writes in a preface, that shows "arrangement" (AN
101). Thus my reading of the Jamesian reﬂector has also gown out of Susan Griﬂin's
argument that "[t]o perceive in James's ﬁctions is to compose reality into pictures."23 The
picture, that is, the image, reveals the reﬂector's ability to arrange impressions. Because
Spencer Brydon arranges his impressions of what he might have been if he had never left
New York, his imagination is able to personify them as an "image" of "some strange

ﬁgure".24 And as these impressions continue to gow, the "image" continues to gow, and

12

consequently the ﬁgure of what he might have been gows into the ﬁgure of his other self,
and into the ﬁgure of a ﬁctional narrative of what he might have been, which he reads in
the "margin" of the door, and which is therefore also a ﬁgurative margin of the pages of
his ﬁgurative narrative (187). Thus the ﬁgure of his other self, which is also the ﬁgure of
his narrative of what he might have been, manifests itself as a vivid picture: "No portrait
by a geat modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of
his ﬁame with more art, as if there had been ‘treatment,’ of the consummate sort, in his
every shade and salience" (187).

But how are we to ﬁgure out exactly what parts the central consciousness and the
narrator respectively play in the construction of these images? For the development of my
concerns about the relationship between the central consciousness and the narrator, I am
indebted to Teahan, who discusses the Jamesian center of consciousness as a rhetorical
structure, and argues, "indirect discourse, of which the Jamesian reﬂector is a technical
variation, notoriously precludes any absolute rhetorical distinction between the language
attributed to the central intelligence and the narrator’s own third-person discourse. " Thus
Teahan goes on to claim that the conception of the center of consciousness as "a
representational gound" is at once "a necessity and an impossibility."25 Indeed, it is
absolutely impossible to ﬁgure out exactly what role the center of consciousness plays in
representation and ﬁguration. But it also seems to me that there are several instances
where James suggests that the image is the reﬂector's. Thus in the passage of Brydon's
image of " some strange ﬁgure" mentioned above, James begins the paragaph with, "It had
begun to be present to him [Brydon] it met him there - and this was the image under
which he himself judged the matter ...The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with
him" (165). As I read this example, it shows the reﬂector's ability to represent his ideas
through images for which he does not require to depend on the narrator. It exempliﬁes
Bell's point that, by endowing "the perceiving character ...[with] more than common

powers of observation and understanding," James "reduce[s] the authority of the

13

narrator".26 And there are instances where James suggests that the image is the narrator's.
Thus in The Golden Bowl when Amerigo contemplates a ﬁnancially ﬁrlﬁlling ﬁrture with
his imminent marriage, and we are given the image of the aromatic bath, the narrator adds,
"we thus represent him" (48). This "we," which may indicate the narrator's partnership
with the author in the act of "represent[ing]," marks a clear separation from the "him"
which indicates the designated center of consciousness of the ﬁrst volume. But despite this
separation James points out that there is a connection between the two which is not
broken. For the center of consciousness depends on the narrator to represent his thoughts
through an image that he later incorporates into his own system of representation, and
thus this dependence proves to be efﬁcacious for Amerigo. But as James also points out in
regards to this center of consciousness, late in the novel Amerigo creates images without
assistance from the narrator. And through these images James draws a separation between
the narrator and the reﬂector which indicates this reﬂector's problems in the exertion of
narrative authority. But, as he suggests in the case of the reﬂector of the second volume, it
is the narrator who is eager to form an interdependent relation with Maggie, and thus the
narrator who forges an inseparable connection between his images and hers. And in The
Ambassadors, James suggests how the reﬂector, who early in the novel depends on the
narrator for the construction of his images, and therefore whose association with the
narrator seems to be inseparable at that point, learns to surpass the narrator in his
narrational abilities as a result of his ability to create coherent images on his own.

What makes a discussion of ﬁguration also relevant to my argument about the
Jamesian reﬂectors as storytellers is that the images themselves contain scenes, which they
connect with other scenes presented through other images to become parts of a story.
Thus my argument has also gown out of Phyllis Van Slyck's argument about
representation in many of James's novels, particularly in The Golden Bowl: ”The power to
create a portrait - of oneself or another - is, in eﬁ‘ect, 'the power to narrate'".27 As James

shows in The Golden Bowl, Amerigo creates images of his metaphorical voyage that

14

depict little scenes through which he tells Fanny Assingharn the story of ﬁustration in his
perceptual quest, and which he develops out of a "story" that he has read (56). And he
continues this story of his inactivity with subsequent images of water and ship/ boat.
Likewise Maggie creates images, for instance, her image of "dancing," which contain
scenes, and thus little stories (330). She even goes a step ﬁrrther than Amerigo in that she
picks up his image of her as a panting and resting little dancer, although he never verbally
communicates it to her, and makes it a part of the little story of her own inactivity. And
with another image of dancing she depicts a new scene - that of her activity. Her images,
then, show that in composing a picture, Maggie composes a narrative that moves forward,
as it were. "One's work should have composition," James writes in the preface to The
Ambassadors, "because composition alone is positive beauty" (AN 319). The "beauty" of
"composition" is the beauty of organization, orchestration, and the construction of
purpose. Thus a storyteller, who is a perceiver, thinker, and organizer, demonstrates a
well-developed ability to forge connections.

Perched in isolation in his house of ﬁction the author creates his connection, that
is, relation, with the life he watches and interprets. For James, as he writes in the preface
to "The Jolly Corner," a story ultimately "fails" if it "stops short for want of connexions
in the sense of further statement, ...[and] of our own further relation to the elements,
which hang in the void" (AN 257). According to Kaston, most of the centers of
consciousness renounce material experience, withdraw ﬁ'om " personal feeling," and
become "failed irnaginers of a self," and thus they become "failed authors".28 But, perched
in their own houses of ﬁction, these centers of consciousness realize their isolation, and
create their connection with their surroundings, and consequently give their "stories" the
connections in the sense of their own "relation to the elements": "The painter’s subject
consist[s] ever, obviously, of the related state, to each other, of certain ﬁgures and things.
To exhibit these relations is to treat his idea" (AN 5). To relate a story, then, is to

establish relations. And establishing a relation between events parallels and ﬁgures

15

establishing a relation with people. Therefore, as I see the metaphorical house of ﬁction, it
does not invoke the tyrannical "parentally authored structures" from which a "parent-artist
dominate[s] and discipline[s] the material" that Kaston sees in them,28 but rather it
enables these isolated observers to realize the need to establish connections with their
surroundings. For as readers and tellers of stories their aim is to make their own lives

purposeful and meaningful in as many ways as they can.

16

N otes

1. Henry James, W ed. R W. B. Lewis (1934; rpr. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1984) 15. Cited parenthetically as AN.

2. For a discussion of the entrepreneurial implications of the authorial authority in
James and his association of the author with the civil engineer, see Stuart Culver's
”Representing the Author: Henry James, Intellectual Property and the Work of Writing,"
in W ed. Ian F. A Bell (Totowa: Vision and Barnes and
Noble, 1984). Culver argues that J ames's analogy between the author and the civil
engineer "serves ultimately to underscore a crisis in the author's authority"(122).

3. Vivienne Rundle, "Deﬁning Frames: The Prefaces of Henry James and Joseph
Conrad," W 16.1 (1995): 72.

4. Mark Seltzer, WNW (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1984) 14,87-88. Seltzer's argument looks forward to Edward Said's argument about
narrative and power in Culhrreandlmperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993): "The
power to narrate, or to block other narratives ﬁom forming and emerging, is very
important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between
them" (xiii).

5. As Jonathan Auerbach, in W
W (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) observes, James
identiﬁes "his own procreative labors with the passions and labors of his characters" (129).
Thus Auerbach implies that, in effect, James bestows upon his centers of consciousness
these "procreative labors".

6. Laurence Bedwell Holland, IhLExpcnsemesionaEssaymnmCraﬁmf
Henrylamcs (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964) 165,119.

7. Tony Tanner, WWW
Litcxamne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) 318.

17

O

8. Ora Segal, IhelmdeeﬂectnrﬂﬂhmchHennLlamcsLErmcn (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969) x,xii.

9. Carolyn Porter, WWW
Wanna: (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981) 122.

10. Paul Armstrong, Ihelhencmenolcgymfﬂenmlames (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1983) 63,64.

11. Sharon Cameron, Thinkinginﬂcmllamcs (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1989) 42.

12. Daniel Mark Fogel, WW
Imagination (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) 25.

13. William Goetz, WWW (Baton
Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) 207.

14. Henry James, ItLthiLCagc. WW (Middlesex: Penguin
Books Ltd., 1972) 15,21,23.

15. Henry James, Wars (1903; London: Penguin Books, 1986) 179.

16. Henry James, W (1904; London: Penguin Books, 1985)
56,123.

17. Henry James. "The Art of Fiction,” W (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1948) 10,11.

18. J. Hillis Miller, ”Line," AriadnciLIhmad (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1992) 6.

19. Sheila Teahan, IhLRhcmﬁQallagiLQLHthlames (Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995) 137.

20. Millicent Bell, Meaningjnﬁcnndames (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1991) 33.

21. Carren Kaston, Imaginaﬂnmandﬂcsminjhehloxelsjfﬂmmlames (New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984) 10.

18

22. Edgar Dryden, "The Image in the Mirror: James's Emit and the Economy of

Romance,” IheJEnnnmﬁAmericanBomance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988) 125.
23. Susan M. Grifﬁn, "The Selﬁsh Eye: Strether‘s Principles of Psychology,"

; tt-t .zt " :i : a o u: . "m .' to “Tan. :H :'. '09.” 56.3
(1984): 401.

24. Henry James, "The Jolly Corner," Wales (London:
Penguin Books, 1990) 165.

25. Teahan, 2,11.

26. Bell, 14.

27. Phyllis Van Slyck, "'An innate preference for the represented subject'"
Portraiture and Knowledge in W" W 15.2 (1994):
180. As her quotation reveals, Van Slyck, in turn, has been inﬂuenced by Edward Said's

28. Kaston, 3,7-8.

Chapter 1

IN THE CAGE OF COMMONNESS

In his preface to In the Cage, James reveals his interest in ”the question of what it
might 'mean,‘ wherever the admirable service [of a postal-telegaph ofﬁce] was installed,
for conﬁned and cramped and yet considerably tutored young oﬂicials of either sex to be
made ﬁ‘ee, intellectually, of a range of experience otherwise closed to them".1 This
intellectual ﬁ'eedom to mull over "a range of experience" in conﬁnement that James allows
his telegaphist, enables her to make narrative connections among the bits and pieces of
information about upper class life that she receives by way of the telegams which pass
through her hands. By allowing her to make interpretations and analyses, and
consequently to read parts of the story of the Captain's romantic life, which is prompted by
her desire to bring reﬁnement into her stiﬂed life, James shows that his protagonist exerts
narrative authority as a reader. She even creates romantic narratives about the Captain's
intimate relationship with Lady Bradeen and about her own imaginary intimacy with him.
But these narrative projects prove to be unsuccessful, and therefore remain incomplete. It
seems as though James reﬁrses to let his protagonist become a teller of stories even while
allowing her to develop as a reader of them. Thus even when her narrative projects come
to a standstill, she exerts narrative authority as a reader that enables her ultimately to
move beyond reading or constructing sentimental ﬁction. According to Duncan Aswell,
who has no sympathy for the reﬂector of this novella, "the last laugh is always at the
expense of the girl herself" whose intelligence or sophistication is merely her delusion.2
And even for Jean Blackall, who clearly has some sympathy for the protagonist, James

only ironizes her in that he shows her ingenuity or clearsightedness and then undercuts it

19

20

by "his insistence on ...[her] limitations".3 But I would like to show that, although James
presents his protagonist in an ironic light by depicting her "limitations," this irony, which is
delicate and mild, and the product of a profoundly acute imagination, is not simply meant
to insist on her limitations, or to produce "the last laugh" at her expense. For if with his
irony James shows the telegaphist's limitations in the form of her indulgence in
sentimental ﬁction, and thus as the teller of a story, then with a turn of the screw of irony
he points out her ultimate rejection of the corpus of sentimental narratives.

In the ﬁrst paragaph of this novella, James describes the protagonist's work as a
telegaphist, and in so doing he gives his readers the circumstances - her constant handling

of "words" - that provoke her to read stories:

Her function was to sit there with two young men - the other telegaphist

and the counter-clerk; to mind the 'sounder', which was always going, to

dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions,

give diﬁcult change and, more than anything else, count words as

numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegams thrust, from

morning till night...4
This image of the sands and the sea which represents the reﬂectors impressions of an
overwhelming sense of ﬁustration and privation, and which is the ﬁrst of a series of
images about water, may either be the narrator's or the joint product of the narrator's and
the reﬂectors. But it seems to me that when James wants his readers to comprehend the
reﬂector's system of representation he clearly indicates, even at the novella's beginning,
that the image is either the telegaphist's or one she shares with the narrator in the
making.5 But for this image of water and sands, James gives no such indication. He, then,
implicitly suggests that this image and several other similar images are the narrator's rather
than the reﬂector's. It shows that when the center of consciousness ﬁrst takes upon herself
to read "stories," she often depends on the narrator's system of representation to give

expression to her thoughts and feelings. Words, when she begins work as a telegaphist,

are merely an endless succession of numbers that reveals no desigi. For to count words as

21

"numberless as the sands of the sea" is to be threatened by or immersed in a sea of
incoherence. Exposed and enigmatic, words in a telegam give her curious glimpses of a
mysterious private world made as public as the "sands of the sea". They stretch continually
and defy her to discover a meaning and purpose or to mold them into meaningfulness and
purposeﬁilness. In other words, they defy her to connect the perpetually increasing,
puzzling, slippery fragnents and read "stories and meanings without end" (23). As James
himself writes in the preface, "the small local [postal-telegaph] oﬂice of one's immediate
neighbourhood ...had ever had, to my sense so much of London to give out, so much of its
huge perpetual story to tell that any momentary wait there seemed to take place in a
strong social draught, the stiﬂ‘est possible breeze of the human comedy" (AN 154).

And for James's unnamed protagonist, who works long hours in the post oﬁce, the
" social draught" is so strong that she responds to it by reading stories about those people
from whose lives her own is completely isolated.6 Although (or perhaps because) she
belongs to the lower class, the telegaphist ﬁnds it necessary to "cultivate ...[the] legend"
of being a "lady" in the class-conscious world of London (26). Her introduction into the
world of telegams has been a shock to her because her customers generally are upper
class people who wire "even their expensive feelings" (18). She is sadly confounded by
"the revelation of the golden shower ﬂying about without a gleam of gold for herself"
(23). Blown away from the beau monde by "the cold breath of disinheritance” to the
cramped space where she works as a public servant in return for a meager wage, the
telegaphist conceives the little telegaph oﬁce as her "cage" (27). As in it she is reminded
of "the geat diﬁ‘erences of the human condition" (49), this cage, as Jennifer Gribble

observes, is a social and economic cage.7

Because it is a socioeconomic cage for the
disguntled telegaphist, it is the cage of commonality, that is, the cage of common people
where she is only an indistinguishable part of the multitude, and thus a nameless
representative of it. But her interest in upper class people is not simply because of the

indigent person's astonished and painful curiosity of "the proﬂigate rich [who] scatter[]

22

about them, in extravagant chatter ...an amount of money that would have held the
stricken household of her ﬁightened childhood together for a lifetime" (21-22).

The sensitive telegaphist is irresistibly drawn to deciphering the mysterious details
of aristocratic people's lives, and thus to reading the stories of their lives, particularly
because of her idea that they exhibit "a play of reﬁnement and subtlety" (22). As Philip
Sicker observes, she " sees no logical relationship between her own intellectual superiority
and the economic state to which fate has reduced her. "8 What frustrates the telegaphist
about her economic state is the restraints it imposes upon her quest for "reﬁnement and
subtlety". As her image of the " golden shower" suggests,9 wealth to her sigriﬁes the feel
of the ﬁne stream of delicacy. Splendor, for her, as James ironically suggests, is the balmy

touch that cleanses and sublimates the upper class world.

Her conceit, her baﬁled vanity were possibly monstrous; She certainly
threw herself into a deﬁant conviction that she would have done the whole
thing much better. But her geatest comfort, on the whole, was her
comparative vision of the men; by whom I mean the unmistakable
gentlemen, for she had no interest in the spurious or the shabby, and no
mercy at all for the poor... her fancy, in some directions so alert, had never
a throb for any sigr of the sordid. (23)

James's ironic mirth at the expense of the telegaphist is completely explicit. This, I
suspect, is also why the third-person narrator makes a ﬁrst-person intrusion in this
passage. It seems as though the narrator ﬁnds it necessary to mark here (and in two
preceding chapters) a separation from the center of consciousness, that is, as though
James marks a break in the indeterminate relation between the narrator and the reﬂector.
In addition, the narrative voice even mentions "we" once, which plural pronoun
presumably suggests the narrator's partnership with the narratee in opposition to
partnership with the center of consciousness (45). For her "fancy" becomes dull or empty
when it encounters the sign of poverty, and yet it teems with "vision" when it encounters

the sign of wealth in members of the opposite sex. As Ralf Norrman observes, the

23

telegaphist's goal is to rise socially. 10 But, as James also points out despite all his irony,
such a goal is guided by her profound concern for reﬁnement. Although she is well aware
that there are "places commoner still than Cocker's," it does not relieve her own
impression of the coarse, plebeian "picture of servitude and promiscuity that she must
present to the eye of comparative ﬁeedom" as she sits conﬁned in the post oﬂ'ice, her cage
of commonness (29). Her obsessive desire to connect the "clues" she keeps by way of the
telegams, and thus to read stories of upper class life, even as she sits in her cage, is
reﬂective of her desire to create reﬁnement in her own coarse and stiﬂed life (14). Thus
she turns to two representatives of the upper class, Lady Bradeen and Captain Everard,
and to a perusal of their telegams. For the idealizing little telegaphist, these adulterous
lovers are the ﬂowers of aristocracy: Their beauty is meaningful because of their
reﬁnement. Lady Bradeen is exquisite because of the extreme reﬁnement of her "manner
that, even at bad moments, was a magniﬁcent habit and of the very essence of innumerable
things"(15). A subtle play of reﬁnement seemingly saturates her entire being, for it has
soaked her highly polished surface - the "light" of her eyes and the "colour" of her hair -
with "splendour" (15). To the idealizing telegaphist, this subtle play of reﬁnement is so
spontaneous that its possessor exhibits complete unconsciousness of it. Likewise, Captain
Everard is fascinatingly handsome because, with his "awfully good manners, " he seems to

represent

people of that class...These manners were for everybody...What he did take
for ganted was all sorts of facility; and his high pleasantness, ...his
unconscious bestowal of opportunities, of boons, of blessings, were all a
part of his magiiﬁcent security... He was, somehow, at once very bright
and very gave, very young and immensely complete; and whatever he was
at any moment, it was always so much as all the rest the mere bloom of his
beatitude. (20)

Ifthe telegaphist's devotion for this apparently dashing specimen of the upper class ﬁnds

expression in devotional excrescences ("beatitude"), then, at this stage, her readings seem

24

to reveal nothing more than puerility. It seems to her that the Captain's radiance gows on
him like an exquisite ﬂower. As James ironizes the telegaphist's idealized view, the
Captain's radiance sigiiﬁes the spontaneous "bloom" of his conﬁdence and ease. Thus her
aristocratic couple's reﬁnement, for the telegaphist, leads to their "happi[ness]" (19). For
in reﬁned manners she reads the story of "magniﬁcent security".

In the reﬁnement of manners the telegaphist reads the story of a "complete" sense
of self. She begins to connect the different elements of Captain Everard's appearance and
attempts to draw a sketch of his character by gasping his type. He is "complete," and
therefore, for the telegaphist, the happy possessor of a public identity, which comes ﬁom
her view of his social status and his occupation, as well as a private or "personal identity, "
which comes from her view of his individual distinction (20). Likewise, Lady Bradeen with
all her delicate and distinct beauty, and with her title, has a private and a public identity.
What Lady Bradeen "couldn't have got rid of ...if she had wished" comes ﬁ'om her
manners, which in turn have become possible because of her social class, and gives her a
distinctive appearance (15). Her reﬁned manners give the telegaphist a sense of the
aristocratic woman's "innumerable things - her beauty, her birth, her father and mother, her
cousins, and all her ancestors" (15). Thus her mariners tell the story of the inﬂuence of
heritage on a particular member of her family. And when the telegaphist starts reading the
story of a social world of personal relationships, the meaning she gleans is that the people
with reﬁned manners have a private identity because of their social identity. It seems to the
telegaphist that upper class people's social life helps them to be recognized as distinct
individuals. Thus the telegaphist is struck by a luxurious profusion of personal names in
Lady Bradeen's telegams, the names of her ﬁiends: "Agres," "Fritz," and "Gussy" (14).
This accumulation of personal names extends to the writer of the telegams herself:
"Cissy" and "Mary" (14). Certainly the telegaphist is well aware that the abundance of
personal names demonstrates the promiscuous practice of blurring and disguising a

person's identity. Thus she connects the phenomenon of Cissy Bradeen's use of a

25

pseudonym with the phenomenon of "ladies wiring to diﬁ‘erent persons under diﬁ‘erent
names" (14). But the interpretation she is much preoccupied with is that the plurality of
names illustrates a wealth of social and personal "relation[s] of elegant privacy" (29).11
Thus, through the telegaphist's memory of a particular incident in this connection, James
points out how she reads the story of protective ﬁiendship: "There had once been one
[lady] ...who without winking, sent oﬂ‘ ﬁve [telegams] over ﬁve diﬁ‘erent signatures.
Perhaps these represented ﬁve diﬁ‘erent friends" (14, my emphasis). What this copiousness
of names suggests to the telegaphist, then, as J arnes ironizes her, is not so much the upper
class people's impenetrableness,12 as their active social life that enables them to be
recognized as distinct persons. Thus, in the case of Captain Everard too, she is struck by a
luxuriance of personal names. It does not matter to her that she cannot locate Everard's
private identity because of all his pseudonyms and titles. For it seems to her that his ﬁiends
certainly can. It seems almost as if all his diﬂ‘erent appellations constitute diﬂ‘erent parts of
his distinct being for the infatuated young telegaphist. They point out his immense social
contacts for her. Therefore they point out all his individual relationships with different
people. And thus all these diﬂ‘erent names point out to her "whatever he ...[is] and
probably whatever he ...[isn't]" (21). For the telegaphist, whatever he is not seems to help
her in ﬁnding out whatever he is. But to J ames's readers, whatever he is and whatever he
is not point out his elusiveness. As Tzvetan Todorov asserts, the "essence" of Captain
Everard's character is ungaspable. 13 And as Joel Salzburg observes, Everard "appears to
have lost an authentic self among his social masks".14 I would add that James, with his
penchant for irony - "whatever he was" - also makes a proleptic allusion through the
plethora of the Captain's personal names to the professional deceit he practices and that
catches up with him late in the novella.

But even in the midst of his ironic portrayal of the telegaphist, James points out
that she turns to reﬂect on her own life, and what she reads is the absence of a personal

identity and therefore the story not of happy relations but of ﬁ'ustration in personal

26

relationships. She yearns to have "a personal identity" for the Captain, and to have a
personal relationship with him: "the thing in all [that Captain Everard experiences in the
little post oﬁce] that she would have liked most unspeakably to put to the test was the
possibility of her having for him a personal identity that might in a particular way appeal"
(20). To conduct this "test" is to create a personal relationship with him. She suﬁ‘ers
enormously ﬁom her sense of a lack of social relations, and therefore of personal relations
in "the intense publicity of her profession" (11). It seems to her that she is enclosed in a

public world with no scope for private relations, and therefore for a personal identity:

It had occurred to her early in her position - that of a young person
spending , in ﬁ'amed and wired conﬁnement, the life of a guinea-pig or a
magpie - she should know a geat many persons without their recognizing
the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively - though
singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much
smothered - to see any one come in whom she knew, as she called it,
outside, and who could add something to the poor identity of her function.

(9)-
Even with the ﬁrst lines of his novella, then, James points out his protagonist's vexation at
her public life which shows an absence of a personal identity. To be "recogniz[ed]” is for
her to have a personal identity for, and thus a personal relationship with, the person who
does the recognizing. James gives expression to the center of consciousness's own absence
of a self-identity by giving her only a professional "identity" and never a name. She even
strips herself (and her fellow-workers) of a human identity, as the images of conﬁnement -
birds and animals - reveal. And as her impressions reveal, this absence of a personal
identity is linked with a deﬁciency in personal relations. Her need of personal relations is
not simply conﬁned to a need of romantic love. 15 With her alcoholic mother she has such
a strained relationship that all she can do is smolder in vain with "the rage at moments of
not knowing" how she gets hold of alcohol (13). The two women live under the same roof
with hardly any communication it seems. Even with the ones she does have

communication, it seems she can at best have only acquaintances. Thus Mrs. Jordan, for

27

the telegaphist, is more of an "acquaintance" than a ﬁiend (29). And with her ﬁance, Mr.
Mudge, she has such a starchy relationship that she thinks of him only in terms of his
surname. The thought of marrying Mr. Mudge is not at all exciting to her because, as
James points out with his bantering tone, it suggests the conspicuous absence of the
dynamic and vital story of a romantic bond: "after her consent to their engagement, she
had often asked herself what it was that marriage would be able to add to a familiarity so
ﬁnal" (10). What irritates her most about Mr. Mudge is that for him she has no personal
identity: "There were times when she wondered how in the world she could bear him, how
she could bear any man so srnugly unconscious of the immensity of her difference. It was
just for this diﬁ‘erence that, if she was to be liked at all, she wanted to be liked" (33). But
as James points out with his subtle play of irony, she herself often neglects to recogiize
”the immensity" of her difference from others, and only barely recogiizes a "human"
identity in Mudge (33).

As Mr. Mudge does not possess a personal identity as far as the center of
consciousness is concerned, so he does not have the ability to read or create a story of
success in his personal relationship. The success Mr. Mudge has achieved is in acquiring
an occupational identity: "His very beauty was the beauty of a gocer, and the ﬁnest ﬁrture
would offer it none too much room to expand. She had engaged herself, in short, to the
perfection of a type" (34). His only identity is his professional identity: that of a typical
English gocer. Thus the causal connections he follows, and consequently the story he
comprehends, is only in his professional world: "the exuberance of the aristocracy was the
advantage of trade, and everything was knit together in a richness of pattern that it was
good to follow with one's ﬁnger-tips" (3 7). In this "perfection of a type," his ﬁancee does
not read the possibility of a distinct individual character, and thus of a personal identity.
For 'where there is "none too much room [for him] to expand" is in his personal world.
Consequently, when it comes to the story of his personal relationship, there is only

frustration. During their vacation at Bournemouth, Mr. Mudge's "resources" of

28

amusement, which are a world apart from the telegaphist's, include the "perpetual
counting of the ﬁgures" on the pier (65). For the telegaphist, who sits in her cage and
lives "the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie," it has been necessary to attempt to convert
words that are "as numberless as the sands of the sea," and therefore that are an endless
succession of mere numbers, into stories about upper class people's private lives. Now
James points out how her ﬁance sits by the literal sea and, far from reading any story of
personal relationships, converts people into mere numbers. Indeed, they themselves have
become "close-packed items in terriﬁc totals of enjoyment" (64). Unlike his ﬁancee, he
does not even attempt to read a story about other people's personal relationships; but like
her he falls into self-objectiﬁcation, for like her, he cannot read the story of success in his
own personal relationship. After having to swallow his ﬁancee's admission (which he tries
to do with the aid of a "chocolate cream[]") that she is willing to do "anything" which
means "everything" for a gentleman customer, poor Mr. Mudge is reduced to identifying
himself as the man who is in "danger" from the woman he loves, and therefore the man in
a "funk" (68,69). The telegaphist even ﬁ'ustrates his attempt to divert her attention from

the aristocratic male customer who has become the center of her thoughts:

"....I must just keep on as long as he may want me."

"Want you to sit with him in the Park?"

"He may want me for that - but ...I can do better for him in another manner. "

"And what manner, pray?"

"Well, elsewhere."

'Elsewhere? - I say! "

..... "You needn't 'say' - there's nothing to be said. And yet you ought perhaps to
know." (68)

Alarmed by the vague "want" she mentions - what does her customer "want" his ﬁancee
for? - Mr. Mudge tries to gibe and thus to reduce the serious implication of that word:
"Want you to sit with him in the Park?" But his ﬁancee resists his attempt to take control
of the situation with her own unruﬂled superciliousness: "He may want me for that ..."

Further, she ﬁrmly suppresses his attempt to "say" anything. To ﬁustrate Mudge's attempt

29

to "say" is to ﬁ'ustrate his attempt to assert his relationship with the telegaphist. In eﬁ‘ect,
it is to stop him ﬁom telling the story of a successful relationship with the telegaphist:
"You needn't 'say' - there's nothing to be said." Instead he is admonished by his ﬁancee to
listen to ("know") the story of her potential relationship with one of her gentlemen
customers.

As in the case of Mr. Mudge, so in the case of Mrs. Jordan, the novella suggests
the absence of a personal identity, and consequently her inability to create a story of
success in personal relationships. Thus Mrs. Jordan, the struggling widow of a clergyman,
too is referred to only by a surname, which is not even her own. As an imaginative reader,
who at this stage has become familiar with the act of reading stories of other people's
lives, the telegaphist responds to Mrs. J ordan's "discourse" by creating her own image to
represent her impressions of the latter's past: "This small domain, which her young ﬁiend
had never seen, bloomed in Mrs. Jordan's discourse like a new Eden, and she converted
the past into a bank of violets by the tone in which she said, 'Of course you always knew
my one passionl'" (25). The story of the "new Eden" then, is the story of the past, of brief
bliss and transient happiness, of an unrealizable dream of a perfect union between man and
woman, and it is also the story of the fall of that union. Although the widow in the present
has taken up the profession of ﬂoral arrangements in the "real homes of luxury," these
symbolical ﬂowers are not her own. For her own "Eden" is irretrievably lost. And all she
can do is delude herself about "liv[ing] again with one's own people" (26). As Salzburg
observes, "James uses a mock-religious language" to expose Mrs. Jordan as a false savior:
"Mrs Jordan's name, for instance, carries the implication of a passage to a promised land,
but in the extent of her own powers the woman proves to be no more than a fairy-
godmother manquee."16 Her name implies that the promised land is the home of luxury
she herself appears to be progessing towards and hopes to reach. Her journey towards
the promised land, the sumptuous home where she apparently belongs, never ends. For the

"single step ...[that] would socially, would absolutely introduce her" is always beyond her

30

(12). Despite all her "personal calculations" with regard to upper class people, her
personal and therefore social relationships are always ﬁustrated (3 2):

"But does one personally know them?" our young lady went on, since that was the
way to speak. "I mean socially, don't you know? - as you know me."

"They're not so nice as you! " Mrs Jordan charmingly cried. "But I shall see more
and more of them. "

Ah, this was the old story. "But how soon?"

"Why, almost any day..." (28)

Mrs. Jordan, despite all her "ideas" and "the practice of her beautiful art," fails to create
progession in her "story" (28,26). Her "old" story is the story of the unreachable past.
This story does not change and therefore does not gow, just as her professional relation
does not change and does not gow into a personal relation. And in the "pages on pages"
that contain "drawings and plans" which Lord Rye writes to Mrs. Jordan, who dreams
about marrying her way into society, the telegaphist does not read a version of the
Cinderella story that the widow wants her to read or that she hopes to effectuate (30).
This dream is so persistent that even when Mrs. Jordan engages herself to Lord Rye's
butler, she cannot make herself identify him as a butler but as his lordship's "geat and
trusted ﬁiend. Almost - I may say - a loved ﬁiend" (90). As it turns out, then, the more
time that Mrs. Jordan spends professionally in the "homes of luxury," the more thorough
becomes her social isolation from them.

The more thorough the protagonist's own isolation ﬁ'om this world of reﬁnement
and delicacy, the more intolerable appears the cage of commonness in which the she is
immured, and consequently, the more ardent is her search for reprieve. The more
aggavating the rudeness of Mr. Buckton's "cunning hostility," the indelicacy of the
counterclerk's "importunate sympathy," the banality and tediousness of Mr. Mudge's
"daily, deadly, ﬂourishy letter" and, most particularly, the vulgarity of her mother's "caps
and conversation, and whisky," which happens to be "the most haunting of her

n17

worries, the more ardently she seeks solace in the world of imagination (13,11). And

31

the result of this immersion in "fancy" is her "vision for silver threads and moonbeams"
(23). This vision represents her imaginative pattern or design of delicacy and ﬁnesse in a
romantic world. Thus through the telegaphist, James depicts a reader who aims at
"keeping the clues and ﬁnding her way in the tangle", that is, at consciously creating a
pattern of reﬁnement in the stories of upper class romantic relationships (23).

But clearly, as the "margin" of the emblematic telegaph cage is "absent," her
diﬁculties are enormous: " She was so boxed up with her young men, and anything like a
margin so absent, that it needed more art than she could ever possess to pretend in the
least to compass" (29). For Jennifer “Wicke, the telegaphist's cage is "the iron cage of I
Weber's incipient social bureaucratization" where social relations stop. It is also the cage
of words that the telegaph oﬁce necessitates. Consequently, for Wicke, the absence of
margin signiﬁes that the cage "forbids that zone of free relation, whether writerly or
social." It also sigiiﬁes the absence of "a surplus margin above and beyond a speculative
exchange."18 But as it is also possible to see, the "absent" margin in the telegaph cage is
James's comment on the restrictions that his center of consciousness conﬁ'onts within the
pages of "the romance" that she tries to read through Lady Bradeen's telegams to the
Captain (19). To escape her cage of commonness she reads a narrative about an
aristocrat's romantic life. But as soon as she launches into this project she ﬁnds that the
cage of the telegaph oﬁice becomes the cage of romance, 19 for she ﬁnds herself conﬁned
by "allusions" in the telegams that are "tangled in a complexity of questions" (19). The
absence of margin, then, is associated with an absence of explanations of the continual
ﬂow of mysterious elements in which the telegams, her texts, abound. Thus the absence
of margin indicates the actual absence of a coherent desigi indicating purpose and
causality within the romance. For this narrative is about a social class that is alien to her,
and it comes as unconnected bits and pieces made of haphazard facts and ﬁgures. Further,
it has already begun when the telegaphist ﬁrst notices Lady Bradeen and her three

telegams. There is also an absence of margin in the narrative because, although the facts

32

and ﬁgures that the telegaphist collects are limited and mysterious, the ﬁgurative page of
the romance is cluttered by several diﬂ‘erent materials for several different stories. The
"perpetual" story that James mentions in his preface is perpetual because it is made up of
several different individual stories that the sensitive, creative reader becomes conscious of.

But with her active imagination the telegaphist can hardly be expected to accept
the condition of an absent margin.20 As she creates a "margin" for herself in her relation
with Mr. Mudge, so she creates a margin in the narrative of the Captain's liaison with Lady
Bradeen (35). For, ever since her conﬁnement in the cage of romance, she looks for ways
to read dramatic elements in it: "Most of the elements swam straight away, lost themselves
in the bottomless common, and by so doing really kept the page clear. On the clearness,
therefore, what she did retain stood sharply out; she nipped and caught it, turned it over
and interwove it" (24). As Naomi Schor observes, this passage points out how the
telegaphist pieces together the fragnents by "adding something of her own" to the
meager material she ﬁnds: She is not interested in "ﬁnding the ﬁgure in the carpet, but in
weaving the whole cloth" .21 I would also suggest that the telegaphist attempts to erase
the disorderliness from the pages of the romance by reading a dramatic pattern of passion
and adventure with the "margin" of her imagination. She brings narrative connections to
the elements she "retain[s,]" and clears the page of elements that do not contribute to the
dramatic pattern of passion and adventure. And the elements that she nips and catches,
turns over and interweaves into material for dramatic scenes with imaginative fervor, are
material she picks up speciﬁcally with regard to Captain Everard:

The want of margin in the cage , when he peeped through the bars, wholly
ceased to be appreciable. It was a drawback only in superﬁcial commerce.
With Captain Everard she had simply the margin of the universe. It may by
imagined, therefore, how their unuttered reference to all she knew about
him could, in this immensity, play at its ease. (39-40)

When the dashing, young, charming and handsome Everard peeps through the bars of the

cage, there is drama in the air for the telegaphist. It seems she conceives the imagination

33

itself as the "universe" with Everard in the post oﬁce. For Captain Everard passionately
inspires and stimulates the telegaphist's imagination, and she is ready to supply her own
notion of his character into the pages of her romance in the absence of the character she
does not gasp. The "unuttered reference" can "play at its ease" because with "the margin
of the universe" she makes ﬁee use of her imagination in speculating about the Captain's
romantic life.

Speciﬁcally, she attempts to ﬁll the gaps of this romance by reading sentimental
narratives. At lunch time when it is "rather quiet" at Cocker’s, she amuses herself by
reading "novels, very geasy, in ﬁne print and all about ﬁne folks," which she borrows
from the circulating library, " at a ha'penny a day" (l 1). These ha'penny novels are her only
means of entering the impervious world of "ﬁne folks". And when she commences her
project of converting the terse texts, the telegams, into readable stories, these sentimental
novels prove to be her only interpretive tool. They become the notes, as it were, that she
can refer to in ﬁnding her way about the telegaphs' complex, compressed texts. Her
dependence on her ha'penny novels is considerable because they introduce her to some of
the mysterious nuances of upper class lifestyles. A faithﬁrl student of sentimental novels,
she is ready to settle her theory about "Everard's type" and to dismiss his name as merely a
disguise (17). As such a student she eagerly paints Lady Bradeen as the majestic Juno -
despite all the inherent irony of an adulterous Juno - and, consequently, "all" that
surrounds her as "certainly Olympian" (19). With the unstable foundation of her "ha'penny
worths," the telegaphist, in indomitable bursts of self-conﬁdence, ﬁnds herself "piec[ing]
together all sorts of mysteries" (14).

But if James directs his amused irony at his protagonist, then, with another turn of
the screw of irony he points out that the telegaphist's efforts at reading the story of the
Captain's romantic life, despite her melodramatic approach, prove to be rewarding enough

in that she is able to perceive and predict the Captain's and Lady Bradeen's danger:

34

Didn't she catch in his face, at times, even through his smile and his happy
habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered victim appeals,
as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps didn't even know
how scared he was; but she knew. They were in danger, they were in
danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it beat every novel in the shop.
She thought of Mr Mudge and his safe sentiment; she thought of herself
and blushed even more for her tepid response to it. (43)

As James demonstrates through her sense of "a sharp taste of something in her mouth
before she knew it, " at the early stage of her gowth as reader of stories, the telegaphist
reveals a capacity for instinctive awareness (15). But as James also points out through her
reaction at her ﬁrst sight of Captain Everard as he walks into the post oﬁce with Lady
Bradeen, her instincts are not always reliable: "She had been sure she should see the lady
again; But for him it was totally diﬁ‘erent; she should never, never see him. .. Well, she
saw him the very next day" (18). But these instincts show some sigis of development as
she continues to read the story of Everard's romantic life. Thus, "even through his smile
and his happy habit," she reads his "danger". And, despite her attraction for maudlin
elements, the telegaphist has developed her analytical abilities enough to look for parallels
and contrasts. And despite her self-absorbed tendencies, she even makes an eﬁ‘ort at self-
analysis. Interestingly, at this point in the novella, the telegaphist is also beginning to
depend less and less on her ha'penny novels. This is why her apprehension about the
aristocratic couple's danger, which she interpretively brings into the narrative, makes this
romance "beat every novel in the shop. "

This suggests that her response towards sentimental novels is becoming complex in
that, even as she is stimulated by them, she has begun to develop a condescending and
critical attitude towards them. If the romance she reads is superior to the novels in the
" shop, " then James wants his readers to notice that his protagonist is no longer ready to
confer narrative supremacy on these ha'penny novels. Her decreasing dependence on such

novels is also noticeable in her awareness that most of the social codes recorded in her

35

ha'pennyworths are inaccurate: "if the ha'penny novels were not all wrong..." (45, my
emphasis). As her reliance on ha'penny novels decreases so her reliance on the telegams
as texts increases: "She had never seen a boudoir, but there had been lots of boudoirs in
the telegams" (58). And as her conversation with Mr. Mudge on the subject of the
Captain indicates, she is acute enough to realize that Captain Everard is "not only aﬁaid of
the lady - he's afraid of other things" (69). Although she is circumscribed by her naivety,
her obsessive desire to read a story of passion, and by the tenuousness of her facts and
ﬁgures, she shows a vague awareness of "things" in the Captain's life that are "other" than
his romantic relationship with Lady Bradeen. Thus, although she faces limitations, she
shows a certain ability to minimize those limitations.

For as a reader of stories she learns to look for narrative connections, and thus
learns to see "picture[s]" (44). And because these pictures show her ability to read scenes

that are connected, "a picture" even becomes "a panorama":

As the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the world of
whiﬁ‘s and glimpses, and found her divinations work faster and stretch
further. It was a prodigious view as the pressure heightened, a panorama
fed with facts and ﬁgures, ﬂushed with a torrent of colour and
accompanied with wondrous world-music. What it mainly came to at this
period was a picture of how London could amuse itself. (21)

Such a "panorama" suggests the development of an artistic sensibility, the ability to see
narrative connections between causes and effects, to create a meaningful sequence out of
random or incomplete images. The telegaphist's "picture of how London could amuse
itself“ - a picture that has the potential to gow into a comedy of manners - is a
"panorama" because it is a detailed picture that is made up of several connected scenes.
Later, even with the unreﬁned Mr. Mudge at Bournemouth, despite all her condescension
at his crude entertainment of watching "dreadful women in particular, usually fat and in

men's caps and white shoes," her sense of a "panorama" is so strong that she muses about

his sense of "the panorama" around him (65,66). It is because of her own sense of

36

panorama that she connects elements of his character to read a consistent story about his
"latent force": It is the same "latent force" that earlier enables him to subdue the drunken
soldier at Cocker’s and that now enables him to reﬁain from announcing "the geat news"
(that he is now solvent enough to marry) until he disposes of "other matters" (66). At this
point the telegaphist's ability to read a temporal narrative in a single picture has become
so signiﬁcant that she is able to create coherence even in material that strikes her as "a far-

away story . she got back her money by seeing many things, the things of the past year,
fall together and connect themselves, undergo the happy relegation that transforms
melancholy and misery, passion and effort, into experience and knowledge" (65). The
"panorama" begins with the telegaphist's sense of "connect[ions]" or "relations" between
people (19,20), and develops into a comprehensive vision of a series of events, her sense
of stringing events together, with her "divinations," to form continuity (51). The image of
the panorama, then, is suggestive of the "picture" of "the whole experience" (67). The
scenes may be diverse and unfamiliar, but as the image of the "wondrous world-music"
suggests, she has begun to develop the ability to yoke diversity and unfamiliarity into
producing the coherence of "a vista in a painted picture, " even if it is only a false
coherence (51). She may be "reduced to merely picturing that miraculous meeting ...[with
the Captain]," but just as in the case of her ridiculous circuit on the way home, she ﬁnds a
way to "miraculous[ly]" transform the mere pictures, and actually meet the Captain
beyond the cage.

Thus, as the ﬁrst scene of the Dolrnan telegam suggests, despite his amused irony
at the telegaphist, James points out that she acquires narrative authority as a reader.
When Lady Bradeen authors this telegam, which for the telegaphist is another part of the
narrative she reads about the Captain's romantic life, her ladyship realizes that she has
made a mistake. Her exclamation that she "must alter a word " clearly indicates that Lady
Bradeen has no intention of authoring a text with a hidden meaning in order to ensure its

protection if it falls into the wrong hands of an interceptor (47). The only reason the

37

troubled writer fails to make the revision is that she simply does not remember the
numbers she earlier receives from somebody else or conceives on her own. Thus she does
not know how to revise her own text: "she recovered her telegam and looked over it
again; but she had a new, obvious trouble, and studied it without deciding" (47). It is at
this point that the "author" who fails to read her own text is vanquished by the reader who

intrudes and makes a revision:

It was as if she had bodily leaped - cleared the top of the cage and
alighted on her interlocutress. ..... Our young ﬁiend smiled, meeting the
other's eyes, and, having made Juno blush, proceeded to patronize her. "I'll
do it" - she put out a competent hand. Her ladyship only submitted,
conﬁised and bewildered, all presence of mind quite gone; and the next
moment the telegam was in the cage again and its author out of the shop.

Then quickly, boldly, under all the eyes that might have witnessed her

tampering, the extraordinary little person at Cocker‘s made the proper

change. (48).
In this scene of "[h]er ladyship['s] submi[ssion]," James, then, shows that the "author"
guiltily and hastily surrenders her narrative authority to the reader without realizing that
the telegaphist refers to her mistake of her own (that is, Lady Bradeen's) address for
Dolrnan, and not to the mistake in the numbers or any other part of the message in the
telegam. Consequently, at this moment the telegaphist breaks out of her cage of
commonality and experiences the delight of soaring triumph. But, as James ironically
suggests, if she soars up then she also comes down ("alight[s]"). For she is an intrusive
("tampering"), impertinent "little" person who "patronize[s]" another person. She is, in her
self—objectiﬁed status, like a bird, and because of her intrusive hand and bold speech, here
James makes the reader recall the "magpie" of the ﬁrst sentence of this novella. As Tony
Tanner asserts, through the image of the magpie, James depicts the telegaphist as
someone who has a predilection for seizing and hoarding precious things in which the
outcast - excluded from participation - ﬁnds consolation.22 Further, with her mawkish

insistence on conceiving Lady Bradeen as "Juno," the telegaphist creates the amusingly

38

ludicrous picture of herself as Juno's bird, the peacock! Thus, by "clear[ing] the top of the
cage and alight[ing] on her interlocutress,"23 the girl only commits herself to her
ladyship's service. But if James ironically calls her an "extraordinary" person, then with
further irony he also points out in the same passage that she is a remarkably careﬁil reader
whose revising "hand" is "competent" enough to make a "proper" alteration on the basis of
her past reading: " she put out a competent hand... Then quickly, boldly made the proper
change." According to Norman, this "change" presumably increases the couple's danger
by exposing their " secret system of communication".24 But because of the telegaphist's
intrusive narrative authority, the "conﬁrsed, and bewilder " Lady Bradeen terminates her
search for the mistake. It is not utterly improbable that if this search were longer, the
author of the telegam would ultimately have found the right numbers and corrected her
mistake, which correction would have led to dire consequences for her lover and herself.
And because of this intrusive narrative authority the telegaphist, with the "change" of
address she makes, helps to make the telegam appear authentic and not deliberately
misleading to the interceptor(s). The telegaphist's interfering, patronizing, criticizing hand
shows how she has developed an "intense vision" (and consequently enhanced her
memory) by way of the romance she reads (45). Thus James writes in the preface, "To
criticise is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in ﬁne
a relation with the criticised thing [that is, Lady Bradeen's text, the Dolman telegam] and
make it one's [that is, the imaginative telegaphist's] own" (AN 154).

Indeed, the imaginative telegaphist develops narrative authority as reader to such
an extent that she even goes on to absorb the narrator's imagery of water into her own
system of representation. The narrator builds a series of water images alter the ﬁrst image
of the sands and sea, which represent the wondering reﬂector's oppressive sense of
bewilderment. For example, the bustling and buoyant upper-class world of fashion and the
extravagant activities of its airy members, who have awakened with the spring, pose such

a challenge and a tantalizing torment for the telegaphist, who staggers laboriously under

39

the weight of the lower classes, that the narrator represents her impressions through
images of the stormy "waves of fashion" (13), "a returning tide," (15) "a sea of other
allusions" (l9), and "ladies submerged, ﬂoundering, panting, swimming for their lives"
(26). The image of water represents her emotionally charged impressions of the ﬂuid,
unstable, slippery and uncontrollable world of elegance and luxury. And in the hot and dry
days of summer, as she sits in "her stuﬂiy comer" in the cage of commonness she is
distressed by her bewildered impressions of fashionable resorts: "the names - Eastboume,
Folkstone, Cromer, Scarborough, Whitby - tormented her with something of the sound of
the plash of water that haunts the traveller in the desert" (49). To be overwhelmed and
tormented by the unreachable and uncontrollable world of elegance and luxury is to be
ﬁ'ustrated and tormented by the overwhelming and uncontrollable world of penury and
privation, and thus by Mr. Mudge's economical plans for their vacation at Bournemouth:
"he had ﬂooded their talk with wild waves of calculation" (49). In all these images James
never makes any suggestion that the reﬂector is involved in the creation of these images.
At Bournemouth, however, he shows that the reﬂector literalizes the narrator‘s metaphors.
For, just as James never metaphorically depicts her as enjoying the uncontrollable or
unreachable water, so at Bournemouth he never depicts her in the act of literally entering
and thus enjoying the water. She puts a noticeable distance between herself and the water
as she sits on the pier, on the cliffs, on the decks of steamers, or at the far end of the
beach. Her literal association is with the sands of the beach just as her metaphorical
association is with "the sand on the ﬂoor" (40), or with words that are like "sands of the
sea," or with "the desert." Sitting on the beach, she prefers to observe and contemplate.
Because she is an "intense observer," her "muﬂ'led perception" develops into "perception,"
and her perception evokes "reﬂection" (47,45,46). And her reﬂections, even as she sits in
the beach, enable her to read a "far-away story" in "a picture" (65). Through the
literalization of the narrator's metaphors, then, James shows how the reﬂector absorbs the

metaphors. Thus she subsequently goes on to create her own images of water to represent

40

her impressions of uncontrollable bewilderment. For example, as she realizes through her
verbal exchanges with the helpless Captain that her memory is in complete possession of
the contents of Lady Bradeen's Dolman telegam, her "emotion was such a ﬂood that she
had to press it back with all her force" (83). The telegaphist, then, feels the metaphorical
"ﬂood," just as she does a little later in the same exchanges with the Captain: "Heavens!
what was he going to say? - ﬂooding poor Paddington with wild betrayals!" (84). As
James implies despite his ironic mirth at her anxious concern for the Captain,25 the
reﬂector has developed the narrator's ability of representation.

The telegaphist's interest in the Captain gows so steadily that she even attempts
to create a dramatic story about the adulterous couple. For, clearly, she takes hardly any

interest in ﬂat and passionless ("prosaic and coarse") stories (49):

It was just the talk - so proﬁrse sometimes that she wondered what was left
for their real meetings - of the happiest people of the world... If the girl,
missing the answers, her ladyship's own outpourings, sometimes wished
that Cocker's had only been one of the bigger omces where telegams
arrived as well as departed, there were yet ways in which, on the whole,
she pressed the romance closer by reason of the very quantity of
imagination that it demanded. (19)

As James suggests, his protagonist even in the beginning has begun to be carried away by
the liaison between Lady Bradeen and Captain Everard. And one of the "ways" by which
she tries to overcome the problem of limited information in the romance she reads through
the telegams is by attempting to create a romantic comedy about her aristocratic lovers.
This is why their proﬁrse "talk," as James subtly suggests, for his protagonist, has begun to
be associated with the dramatic dialogue (in the actual absence of proper dialogues) of
"the happiest people in the world." She has decided, because of her own infatuation with
the dashing and handsome Captain Everard, to "take a pure and noble account of such an
infatuation [as the one that governs his aﬂ‘air with Lady Bradeen] and even of such

impropriety" (40). And this desire to take a "noble accoun " shows her inclination to make

41

not just a romantic comedy but also a high comedy out of the Captain's romantic life. For
she interprets their "large and complicated game" which has a "ﬁne, soundless pulse," as
"their high encounter with life" (17). Such an exalted view corresponds with her aversion
to "vulgar plays" (33).

But as the focus of her narrative exploits is Captain Everard himself, the
telegaphist herself has begun to supplant Lady Bradeen as the heroine of a new romantic
or high comedy. More speciﬁcally, her romantic comedy about the Captain's aﬁ‘air with
Lady Bradeen gives way to a romantic or high comedy about her own imaginary personal
relationship with him. Thus she has begun to picture a new dramatic episode with herself
as the heroine and the Captain as the hero. The farther she moves away from the
constraints imposed by the romance the easier it becomes for her to indulge in familial
ﬂights. Consequently, as James announces with ironic amusement, even the heroic stature
of the Captain increases dramatically in her eyes: whatever "spot" he stands on is
"sanctifIied]" by his presence (46). In the actual Captain Everard she hopes to ﬁnd the
character of her dramatic narrative: he is "the object of her homage" (46). With her
vigorously active imagination she ﬁnds a way out of the disappointment of not playing an
interesting and noble role herself. Thus, although she receives "the sharpest impression" of
"the unattainable plains of heaven," as Lady Bradeen comes with her unguessable thoughts
to author her Dolman telegam, these unguessable thoughts also cause her "to thrill with a
sense of the high company she did somehow keep" (46). In short, these unguessable
thoughts help her to supplant Lady Bradeen in the role of heroine. Susan Wmnett argues
that at the point the telegaphist "crosses the street" to walk towards the Captain's
residence, she crosses "into the frame of the text of manners and violates the frames that
separate art from life and her life from the upper classes".26 As a result of her circular
walk home, she has already begun to devise the "ideal setting for the ideal speech" (44).
And when she sees her opportunity to make her dramatic entry, she jumps into the " stage"

(literally she starts to cross the street to the Captain's side of it) "for the small momentary

42

drama" (52). And once she is on this "stage," she launches straight into the climactic scene

with her version of "the ideal speech":

"I've known perfectly that you knew I took trouble for you; and that
knowledge has been for me, and I seemed to see it was for you, as if there
were something - I don't know what to call it! - between us. I mean
something unusual and good - something not a bit horrid or vulgar." (57)

And to this outburst she emphatically adds, "I'd do anything for you. I'd do anything for
you" (58). This is the "high and ﬁne brave[] and magniﬁcent[]" "truth" that governs her
present action (58). This is the "tru " that is the essence of her dramatic narrative. Her
insistence on reﬁned manners and reﬁned environments is so emphatic that even as she
enacts her dramatic scene, she adds fresh details to her "ideal setting". Consequently, the
bench in the Park becomes "a satin sofa in a boudoir" (58).

As James's ironic tone makes clear, the telegaphist's attempt at constructing a
romantic comedy proves to be too " small" and "momentary". No dialogue of noble
sentiments ensues her ardent declaration. Her hero is only embarrassed by her impassioned
speech. And the "ideal setting" proves to be too transient in the "impossible" situation
made up of "obscure and ambiguous" and therefore "impossible" activity among other
couples occupying other benches in the Park (55). Consequently, she fails to create a
personal, that is, a romantic relation with the Captain. As Winnett argues, through this
scene, James demonstrates the telegaphist's delusion, and "enforces the barrier between
the girl's sphere and that of the Captain".26 And instead of a romantically fulﬁlling
denouement, the happy ending of a romantic comedy, the telegaphist conceives a bitter-
sweet scene of star-crossed love that aspires to the tone of tragedy: "I thank and acquit
and release you. Our lives take us. I don't know much - though I have really been
interested - about yours" (80).

Thus both her projects for a romantic comedy remain incomplete. According to

Gribble, the telegaphist weaves stories or "pieces together" a "romance,"27 but as I see

43

her narrative projects, as the teller of a story the telegaphist creates only is a few scenes
and never a complete story. When she launches into her " small momentary drama" in the
Park, that is, when she attempts to create the dramatic narrative about her own personal
relationship with the Captain, we realize that she launches into it without providing a
denouement for the dramatic narrative about Lady Bradeen's relationship with the Captain:
"The chapter wasn't in the least closed" (78). Just as she intrudes into Lady Bradeen's
Dolman telegam, so she intrudes into her narrative project about her ladyship's personal
relationship with the Captain. It seems as though as a teller of stories, the margin she
creates for herself proves to be too "brave" (72). This creates the problem of a beginning
for her new dramatic narrative about her own personal relationship with him. After
meeting him in ﬁ'ont of his residence, she tells him, "Oh, I don't take walks at night! I'm
going home after my wor " (52). But instead of going home, she walks and sits in the
Park with the Captain, and has no idea about how such action comes about. Thus she has
no idea about how she launches into the drama of her personal relationship with him: "She
never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle ["the question of the degee of
properness" that enabled her to walk and sit with him in the Park] " (52). Not to know
quite what she has done to settle the question of proper form is, in this context, not to
know how this new dramatic narrative begins. Perhaps the problem she faces as the teller
of a story is simply because, even though she has " gaps in her learning," she chooses to
focus on people of the upper class. And therefore perhaps the problem is the result of her
naive conﬁdence in her knowledge: "How much I know - how much I know! " (47).28
Another problem with her eﬁ‘orts at creating romantic comedies seems to be with
the hero of these dramatic projects. Her desire is to conceive a romantic and noble, urbane
and genteel hero, and to do so she turns to the actual Captain Everard. But in his
"wonderful face" all she catches is a glimpse of the "old story" of the "Scandal" and shame
of adultery (86). She has wanted to replace the "old story" of the scandal and shame of

adultery by conceiving a new dramatic story of noble passion once with Lady Bradeen as

44

the heroine and once with herself as the heroine. But her strange and portentous fear of
the hero who practically proposes " supper" (76) every time he looks at her after her "small
momentary drama" with him in the Park poses problems for both her versions of the
dramatic story of noble passion. And the "old story" ﬁnds expression only as a courtroom
scene she "[en]vision[s]" in her impression of "a picture" within the Captain's eyes, a scene
in which she is reduced to being the "alibi" of an adulterous man with a tarnished
reputation. If the romantically inclined telegaphist's image for the Captain's implied oﬂ‘er
of a sexual relationship with her is merely "supper," then it sigiiﬁes that his offer as she
conceives it is a mundane and prosaic, emotionless and unimaginative, cliched and routine
matter. In a certain manner, then, it parallels Mr. Mudge's "daily" letter. Certainly James
suggests, as critics have pointed out, the telegaphist's sexual repressions and
inhibitions.29 According to Stuart Hutchinson, her fear is of sexual experience itself and
"it is a prime cause of her romanticism": It is her fear of the intrusion of the real into the
imagined, the idealized, and it motivates her to take refuge in the "cage of her
imagination" which is also the state of virginity.30 But it is also possible to see that the
telegaphist's fear of sexuality that is no more than "supper" is her fear of meaningless
sexuality, her fear of a vulgar ﬂing. James plainly suggests that his protagonist craves the
distinct, individual, delicate touch. Her interpretation of the Captain's looks as a
proposition of entertaining himself with sexuality that can neither be the outcome of nor
lead to noble sentiments thus clashes violently with her project of creating meaning, that
is, a life of sensitiveness and discrimination. Thus it poses a serious problem for the vitality
of her projects for romantic comedy. The telegaphist's fear, for Aswell, is her panic at
losing control over Captain Everard who steps out of the dramatic role she assigns to him.
According to Aswell, the roles she creates and plays are "solipsistic," and her delusional
imagination makes her "increasingly unaware of the world around her. "31 But by
turning the screw of irony James points out that the "solipsistic" telegaphist's goal is not

simply to control meaning but also to create reﬁnement in her own life of coarseness. Thus

45

when the hero is reduced to "ﬁdget[ing] and ﬂounder[ing,]" to displaying "futil[ity]" and
the "want of power" (78), that is, to the indelicacy of nonheroic, igioble passivity, her
projects for romantic comedies tumble into "incoherence" (77).

Consequently, although she looks for heroic material to uphold her theme of
reﬁnement, what she ﬁnds herself ultimately peering into is an appalling abyss of antiheroic

material as becomes obvious in her last conversation with Mrs. Jordan:

The girl met [Mrs Jordan's] eyes a minute, then quite surrendered. "What was
there else about it?"

"Why don't you know?" - Mrs Jordan was almost compassionate.

Her interlocutress had, in the cage, sounded depths, but there was a suggestion
here somehow of an abyss quite measureless. "Of course I know that she would never let
him alone."

"How could she - fancy! - when he had so compromised her?"

The most artless cry they had ever uttered broke, at this, ﬁ'om the younger pair of
lips. "Had he so -?

"Why, don't you know the scandal?" (99)

Indeed, the "abyss" of this passage, in the context of the paucity of the telegaphist's
"know[ledge,]" is a direct reference to an abyss of unknowability. But the abyss of
unknowability, whose "depths" she has already "sounded" when the Captain makes his last
appearance in the post omce, now shows itself to be "measureless" because it reveals that
all she has not known and has not wanted to know is the abysmally bathetic and
anticlimactic material that does not in any way ﬁt into her narrative projects of a romantic
comedy. The abyss of unknowability has become "measureless" because it has become an
abyss of mockery. Instead of one comprehensive and ﬁnal glance at a dashing and
adventurous person's noble exploits, she ﬁnds herself peering into a fearﬁrl and
measureless abyss of sordid and cheap, bleak and petty action. This is the consequence of
her having fallen into "that deepest abyss of all the wonderments" that breaks out for her
as she irnputes to the Captain, despite her awareness of his scant imagination, "the critical
impulse and the acuter vision" (AN 155). Thus, instead of the romantic comedy she has

been trying to construct, she ﬁnds herself reading some kind ofa satirical comedy. Indeed,

46

the moral question always erupts to the surface for the telegaphist with uncontrollable
and unfaltering regularity. It takes the form either of the upper class pe0ple's "silly, guilty
secrets" (22), or of "their little games and secrets and vices" (31), or of their ﬂexible idea
of "inﬁdelity" (53), or of their selﬁsh, extravagant, immoral "horrors" (61). She tries to
suppress the moral question behind the Captain's "debts" with all the art she can muster in
order to read a story of noble passion: "As she didn't speak ﬁankly she only said: His
debts are nothing - when she so adores him'" (98). But, as her "artless cry" sigiiﬁes, all the
art with which she has produced little dramatic scenes crumbles irremediably when she
makes the narrative connection between the Captain's "debts" and "the scandal". By
gasping the causal relationship between "debts" and "scandal," she now reads the story of
his ﬁnancial dishonesty. If she earlier manages to cover the problem of the Captain's
adultery with the warm, bright colors of romantic love, she now ﬁnds that his adultery has
not been the only moral issue. There is yet another moral weakness, one for which she
cannot summon an excuse.

As James points out with his penchant for mild and subtle irony, despite all the
problems she faces as a teller of stories, the telegaphist continues to exercise narrative
authority as an acute reader of stories. Thus, although Mrs. Jordan attempts to oﬁ‘er her a
story of passion and deliverance with Lady Bradeen as the heroine, and the heroine as the
main character, James's "heroine" refuses to read such a story in the material she receives,

as her hesitation to explain anything reveals:

"A good servant," said Mrs Jordan, now thoroughly superior and proportionately
sententious, doesn't need to be told! Her ladyship saved - as a woman so often saves! - the
man she loves. "

This time our heroine took longer to recover herself, but she found a voice at last,
"Ah well - of course I don't know! The geat thing was that he got off. They seem then, in
a manner, " she added, "to have done a geat deal for each other."

"Well, it's she that has done most. She has him tight."

"I see, I see. Goodbye." .......

"And didn't he want to [marry Lady Bradeen]?"

"Not before. "

47

Not before she recovered the telegam?"
Mrs Jordan pulled up a little. "Was it a telegam?"
The girl hesitated. "I thought you said so. I mean whatever it was." (100—101)

James draws a narrative connection between what his protagonist "hesitate[s]" to say and
what she accidentally discloses, and thus reveals that although she stops being the
storyteller, she continues to be a reader of stories. What the telegaphist has now begun to
read is that the adulterous lovers only "seem" to have done "a geat deal for each other."
As a result of her experience in the surprising hazards of interpretation, then, the
telegaphist has come a long way from her conﬁdent view of "the high reality, the bristling
truth" that "ﬂoat[s] through the bars of the cage" early in the novella (15). What has
"ﬂoated through the bars of the cage" of the romance lately is her gowing impression of
the "black darkness" of unknowability (82). And it culminates with "Ah well - of course I
don't know!" She now realizes that appearances are not as readable as she has fancied in
the past. 1

Thus she seems to realize, though she is careﬁll not to provoke the "thoroughly
superior and proportionately sententious" Mrs. Jordan with this realization, that what
these lovers "in a manner" "have done for each other" has not simply been to aid each
other in a mysterious and scandalous personal aﬁ‘air, but also to abet each other in a
mysterious and scandalous impersonal aﬁ‘air. If Mrs. Jordan realizes that the Captain has
done "[s]omething bad" (100), then the telegaphist, who is well aware that Lady Bradeen
"would never let him alone" (99), realizes that her ladyship has been connected with him in
this "bad" deed. This is what she subtly and indirectly reveals when she states, "They seem
then, in a manner, to have done a geat deal for each other." Heroes and heroines indeed!
The telegaphist's realization and her subtle manner of revealing that realization
demonstrate that the reﬁnement she acquires is not what she ﬁnds in the story of the

aristocracy but something she develops as a reader of that story.

48

Thus this passage suggests that as our telegaphist listens to the story that has
gown out of and about the Captain's and Lady Bradeen's scandals, she becomes aware of
the common but insatiable thirst for creating sentimental narratives. Raising her narrative
on the foundation of the sentimental narratives, early in the novella, the telegaphist
composes "a scene better than many in her ha'penny novels," in which she plays the role of
a seductive blackmailer32 and Captain Everard that of a seductive, mischief-making victim
(42). Indeed, she has exhibited an unﬂagging interest in constructing scenes that belong in
sentimental narratives: "She literally fancied once or twice that, projected as ...[the
Captain] was toward his doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears,
as the one pitying pair in the crowd" (43). But she realizes at the end of the novella that
within the bars of the cage of commonness she has only been constructing sentimental
narratives. Thus what she reveals as, with Mrs. Jordan, she declines to divulge her own
role in providing immediate relief to the Captain, is her own reﬁrsal to take any kind of
part - and certainly not that of a heroine - in any kind of sentimental narrative. This is why,
James seems to suggest, his protagonist reﬁrses to be the teller of a story. What she now
becomes aware of as she listens to Mrs. J ordan‘s eulogy of Lady Bradeen, the new
employer of Mr. Drake, the butler, is the tendency of the prospective bride of the butler to
ﬁll in the blanks of the story of her ladyship's adventures (particularly those blanks which
have to do with Lady Bradeen as Captain Everard's accomplice in the scandal of his
nonromantic affairs) with acts of heroism. Thus the telegaphist turns quietly away ﬁ'om
this new sentimental narrative (a successor of Picciola, say, that struggles for its life even
as the frail and feeble "picciola" in Picciola) that Mrs. Jordan, the faithful bride of the
faithﬁil servant, is eager to promote. Carren Kaston argues that the telegaphist has been
caged in melodramatic ﬁction by the cage of her consciousness, and that at the end of the
novella she is "rescued" from this cage. For Kaston, it is "[Mudge's] collaborative
presence [that] helps her out of the cage of consciousness and the imagination of sexual

melodrama".33 And for Salzburg, Mr. Mudge redeems the telegaphist from "her own

49

solipsistic imagination".34 As I see this change in the end, the telegaphist's evolving
imagination now enables her to see that she has been merely reading and therefore
constructing sentimental narratives in the cage of commonness, and thus, it is not so much
her "rescue" ﬁom melodramatic ﬁction as her rejection of it. Indeed, it is her own
realization that redeems her ﬁ'om her "solipsistic imagination". As James writes in the
preface, "the catastrophe" and "the solution" depend on the telegaphist's "winged wit"
(AN 157). It is her imaginative consciousness that causes the "catastrophe" to her
romantic projects, that is, she now realizes that these romantic projects have only been
sentimental projects; and thus, with her imaginative consciousness she also changes, that
is, brings a "solution" to her problem of sentimentalizing. The telegaphist's "Good-bye" to
Mrs. Jordan signiﬁes her abdication of the domain of sentimental narratives. Her ﬁ'eedom
ﬁom the corpus of sentimental narratives and her decision to marry Mr. Mudge3 5 and
thus to move into Chalk Farm, show that even though she cannot escape the cage of class
consciousness, she breaks out of the cage of commonness, that is, of coarseness. James
may not have desired his protagonist to exercise authority as a storyteller, but as he
suggests through the context of sentimental narratives, there seems to be a good reason
for it. This seems to be the case particularly because, despite her failure as a storyteller,
she continues to exercise narrative authority. For she becomes increasingly an acute
reader.

In the middle of the concluding paragaph of this novella James offers a
comparison between the narrator of the story and the center of consciousness. Through
this comparison James seems to suggest that the point of view slips ﬁom the center of
consciousness "A policeman, while she remained [close to the parapet], strolled past her;
then, going away a little ﬁrrther and half lost in the atmosphere, paused and watched her.
But she was quite unaware - she was full of her thoughts" (101, my emphasis). James
seems to suggest here that what the narrator shows awareness of is beyond what the

center of consciousness shows awareness of. And therefore, by suggesting a diﬂ‘erence

50

between what the narrator manages to do and what the center of consciousness does not,
James seems to imply that the narrator has an advantage over the center of consciousness.
But by the same token, he ironically suggests that what the narrator gains over the center
of consciousness is questionable. As James suggests, the narrator is not quite certain about
the reﬂector‘s actions: "Distinguishing vaguely what the low parapet enclosed, she stopped
close to it and stood a while, very intently, but perhaps still sightlessly, looking down on
it" (101, my emphasis). She looks at the waters of the Paddington canal, and not only is
there no sudden resurgence of the narrator‘s water imagery, and therefore of the need of
the narrator's representational skills, which show that the reﬂector now exerts the
narrative authority that the narrator exerts, but there is no need of the reﬂector's own
water imagery either. For, as James implies, she is no longer ﬂooded by emotions. As the
reference to the telegaphist's "thoughts" implies, clearly she has now become more
involved with "thoughts" than with uncontrollable emotions. Although she has "now for
ever lost" the opportunity to be in touch with the Captain, and thus has "lost" the Captain
himself, she does not brood over the loss (99). Further, as James implies, perhaps the
narrator cannot keep up with all of the protagonist's "thoughts": "They were too numerous
to ﬁnd a place just here, but two of the number may at least be mentioned" (101). Indeed
the narrator's voice reveals the narrative virtues of economy and relevance here. But
perhaps it also reveals that the narrator gives us "two" of the telegaphist's thoughts
presumably because the only connection that the narrator has mastered is between these
two thoughts. Of these two thoughts, however, the second is worth studying particularly
because it gives a speciﬁc example of the protagonist's ﬁeedom ﬁ'om sentimental
narratives.

This freedom is clearly exempliﬁed in the ironic vision she directs at herself in the
concluding sentence of the novella: "it was strange that such a matter [as her decision to
marry Mr Mudge immediately] should be at last settled for her by Mr Drake" (102). For
Dale Bauer and Andrew Lakritz, this signiﬁes her amazement at ﬁnding her marriage to be

51

"contingent upon no more nobler things and persons than buﬂers" and that she is
"ruthlessly reduced to her insigniﬁcance in the end".36 But as James points out through
his ironic use of the subtle and indeﬁnite adjective "strange," his protagonist is capable not
simply of being amazed at "her insigiiﬁcance," but also of turning an ironic eye at herself
for her own arrogance. If the telegaphist directs her ironic vision at the pathetically
pretentious Mrs. Jordan via Mr. Drake, the butler, then she also directs a rather dry ironic
vision at her own pathetically pretentious self that cannot rise above prejudice against her
own socioeconomic class. This is her indirect, ironic reference to her own snobbery. It is
her ironic reference to her own "strange" self that does not have the ability to settle such a
matter as marriage by the consideration of love but by that of convenience. It is "strange"
and ironic that despite all her notions about the powerlessness of the lower classes, a
representative of the lower classes exercises the power to settle the matter of her imminent
marriage. And by extension it is "strange" and ironic that despite all her notions about the
powerlessness of the lower classes, Mr. Drake comes up with the power to open the door
of a satirical comedy and close that of the sentimental narratives for herself even as he
opens it for his prospective bride. Thus even in the concluding sentence of the novella
James illustrates his protagonist's narrative authority as an acute reader in that she has
begun to develop an ironic eye. She may not have composed a romantic comedy but the
attempt to compose a dramatic narrative leads her to develop her abilities as a reader and

to develop an essential attribute of the comic spirit.

52

Notes
1. Henry James, W (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1984) 154. Cited parenthetically as AN.
2. Duncan Aswell, ”James's mm: The Telegaphist as Artist," in Texas
- . (is. 8.3 (1966): 376. For

 

Aswell, the telegaphist's "art" is expressive of her self-deception (3 76). In a similar vein,
Charles Thomas Sarnuels, in IheAmbiguithfHenmlames (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press), ﬁnds the telegaphist invincibly petty, and the novella "a gay, pitiless satire" (154).

3. Jean Blackall, "James's 1n__the_Cage: An Approach through the Figurative
Language," UniminLQLInmntaﬂuatteﬂy 31.2 (1962): 177. In this essay on 111th
Cage, Blackall discusses the images of the cage, money, darkness and light, and animals.
For Blackall, the cage is "a place of conﬁnement," but more importantly, it is "a line of
demarcation between two worlds" (164). And it is a study of the telegaphist's "various
relationships" to this central image that enables Blackall to "trace the progess of the girl's
adventure" (167).

4. Henry James, In_thc_Cage_and_cheLSIQrics (Middlesex, England: Penguin
Books Ltd, 1972) 9.

5. For this image neither does James preamble it with "It had occurred to her
early that in her position" (or something similar) as he does in the case of the image of the
cage, which suggests that the image may be the product of both the narrator‘s and the
reﬂector's imagination, nor with "our fatigued ﬁiend had suﬂicient store of mythological
comparison" to see "Juno" in Lady Bradeen, (or with something similar) which leaves no
doubt in the reader's mind as to the origin of the image (9,16).

6. For Leon Edel in W
(Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lipincott Company, 1969), In_the_Cage exempliﬁes
James's own alienation from London. Edel argues that this novella shows James as

assuming "the disguise of a young adolescent gir " who feels abandoned by the

53

environment to which she directs her curious eye (248). According to Edel, it shows how
James gathers himself up after his painful disappointment with the world of the theater.

7. Jennifer Gribble, "Cages," WM 24 (1982): 112. Gribble argues
that James shows through the telegaphist's creative quest "the experience of creative
imagination," though it has its limitations, in the "process of perception" (114). But,
according to Gribble, it is because the telegaphist is excluded from "a 'larger life'" that it
becomes possible for her to experience "the delight of catching impressions of it and
weaving them into 'stories'" (111). And for Maqbool Aziz in "How Long is Long; How
Short Short! Henry James and the Small Circular Frame," in LCnmpanionJLHenry
lamesjmdies, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (W estport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood
Press, 1993), the cage is the cage of the telegaphist's past and present predicaments. But
for Aziz, it is also the cage of her fantasies with regard to Captain Everard, and the cage
of the Victorian civilization at its ﬁnal phase with its "injustices now fortiﬁed with a
machinery" (218).

8. Philip Sicker, WWW
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980) 79. For Sicker, the
telegaphist's cage is "a window of subjective perception," and more importantly "a studio
for self-conscious artistic creation" (80). It is the barrier she imposes against and the
distance she maintains from chaos, the world of ﬂux. Sicker argues that by showing the
telegaphist as eliminating this barrier, James depicts "the artistic imagination gone wild"
(81).

9. For Aziz this image telescopes "the myriads of tensions" within the
telegaphist's soul (224): She is "both attracted and repelled by the 'golden shower' that
will not rain on her" (223). According to Aziz, the "essence" of the story of the
telegaphist in her cage is her "double life" which ﬁlls her with an anguished awareness, for
she is tempted by the glitter but is also "blessed by the vision of the terrors of social and
actual reality" (221).

54

10. RalfNorrman, IcahniquemﬁAmbiglinLinJheEictionancnnLIames (Abo:
Abo Akademi, 1977) 133. Norrman also claims that James uses ambiguity to protect the

suggestiveness of his prose against the onslaughts of the particular.

11. Andrew Moody in "'The Harmless Pleasures of Knowing': Privacy in the
Telegaph Oﬁce and Henry James's 'In the Cage,‘ in W 16.1
(1995), argues that through the telegaphist's ineffectual attempt to comprehend the
private details of the Captain's life, James's novella represents, at a time when telegaph
workers posed "a potential threat of blackmail and a threat to privacy" (65), a system of
communication that "does not threaten upper class privacy" (55). Moody maintains that
although the telegaphist's interest in the upper class goes beyond the harmless pleasure of
knowing, through her Paddington irnpersonality, she returns "to the ethics of treating the
public with anonymity" (64), and thus through "a nameless part of the geat postal
mechanism" within the cage (65), James shows that "employees serve best when they
maintain oﬁieial distance" (61). ‘

12. Priscilla Walton, in IheDismptinnbﬁtheﬁemininemﬂennLlames (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1992) argues that the names and the absences of names in
this novella "sigiify unknowability" (97). According to Walton, the ﬁctions the
telegaphist creates are multiple interpretations engendered ﬁ'om "absence," and therefore
they are "not factual Realist representations" (93).

13. Tzvetan Todorov, W (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1971) 148. Todorov argues that J ames's use of the line of narrative
movement corresponds to a vertical spiral which always leads us back to "the same ﬁgure
in the carpet," that is, there is always the pursuit of knowledge, and thus the "presence of
the quest," and always the "absence of its object" (153).

14. Joel Salzburg, "Mr Mudge as Redemptive Fate: Juxtaposition in James's lathe
Cage," Smdieainlhehlmlel 11.1 (1979): 71. Salzburg's main point is that it is Mudge who

restores the telegaphist from a distorted or incomplete view of reality (70).

55

15. Sicker, 79. For Sicker, the telegaphist's quest for identity through love is
reﬂective of her "nwd to establish a point of ﬁxity" by transforming "the changing beloved
into an unchanging image" (78).

16. Salzburg, 65.

17. William Veeder in "Toxic Mothers, Cultural Criticism: 'In the Cage' and
Elsewhere," in W 14.3 (1993), argues that the initial cause of the
telegaphist's negative traits is not socioeconomic but psychological: She is the disgusted
daughter whose development of a ﬁrnctional self has been hindered by her alcoholic
mother. For Veeder, the ultimate source of the telegaphist's rage, envy, self-hate, and her
projective penchant, is "an archaic sense of contamination" (267).

18. Jennifer “Wicke, "Henry James's Second Wave," W
10.2 (1989): 146,151. According to Wicke, the telegaphist's cage suggests that "the text
can never be aloof ﬁom its historical enmeshings," and the novella itself highlights "the
modern scene of writing - where communication is technologized and words are part of a
larger economy" (151).

19. On a diﬁ‘erent note Muriel Shine, in W
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968) argues that the cage is a
shelter of the creative imagination and that it is "emblematic of a special kind of unreality"
which provides a shelter for "the passive observer of men and manners... ﬁ'om threatening
experiences" (143). Shine's main point about InthCage is that it focuses on "the process
of gowing up" (145): The gowth of the adolescent telegraphist who is maturing into
adulthood, is metaphorical of "the gowth of the artist" (142).

20. For Walton, "margin" on the one hand betokens the telegaphist's conﬁnement
in the post oﬁice and on the other liberty and power (94). Thus Walton argues that the
telegaphist "creates the inside of her text" ﬁ'om "the outside or the margin," yet this text
only reinforces her "marginalization from her creation" (95). Creativity, Walton argues,

"derives ﬁ'om the space of the Feminine Other," and therefore does not engender

56

"Masculine Knowledge" (99). And for Richard Hocks, in W
Stream (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), the telegaphist's "margin" ultimately
sigiiﬁes marginalization: "she decides at the conclusion just how severely marginalized
she herself is" (58).

21. Naomi Schor, "Fiction as Interpretation or Interpretation as Fiction, " 111:
WWW eds. Susan Suleiman and Inge
Crosman (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980) 171. Schor, for whom
the act of interpretation constitutes the whole of the action of this novella, argues that the
telegraphist is "an exemplary interpretant," that is, "the interpreting character" (170,168),
and that her "hermeneutic hyperactivity" is synonymous with creative, imaginative activity
(171).

22. Tony Tanner, WWW
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965) 312. Tanner claims that
James's focus in Injhejlage is on "the wondering imagination," and the telegaphist's cage
is the cage of her isolated imagination" (312). For Tanner, the unnamed protagonist
represents a principle more than an identity, a principle that James uses to represent "the
predicament and ﬁinction of the artist" (318).

23. Janet Gabler-Hover in "The Ethics of Deterrninism in Henry James's 'In the
Cage,” in W 13.3 (1992) argues that this ﬁgurative leap signiﬁes
"the ﬁtful surfacing" of the telegaphist's unconscious desires prompted by envy and
ambition and it expresses her "ambivalence about the upper class" (263). According to
Gabler-Hover, the telegaphist's consciousness prevents her from intentionally indulging in
unethical considerations, and therefore she " escapes into the unconscious" where action
can take the form of accident (263) and where she can give free expression to her animal
instincts or desires, including the desire for sexuality and revenge. In her unconscious
adventures, then, for Gabler-Hover, James's protagonist is "a vampire" (266). But, Gabler-

Hover further argues, through her attempt to transform desire, that is, "through her

57

imagination of higher ethical values" she engages in the "artistic project of creating
meaning and duration" (269,272).

24. Norrman, "The Intercepted Telegam Plot in Henry James's 'In the Cage,‘
W 24.5 (1977) 427. In this essay Norrman focuses on the intercepted
telegam plot to argue that in the novella the main theme is the question of the relationship
between the subjective and objective realities: If on the one hand the romantic imagination
is free to create subjective reality then on the other hand objective reality imposes
constraints on that ﬁeedom. Thus Norrman concludes that the telegaphist's "speculations
go wrong" (427). But we must keep in mind that all of her speculations do not go wrong.
For instance, it turns out that the Captain does live close at hand, or that the lovers are in
danger, or that Lady Bradeen is more eager about her lover than he about her, or that he
does have " other things" worrying him apart ﬁ'om an adulterous relationship. Certainly
J arnes shows, as Norrman claims, making many mistakes, but she is not, as Norrman also
claims, "wrong about everything" (425). . A

25. Heath Moon in "More Royalist Than the King: the Govemess, the
Telegaphist, and Mrs Gracedew," in Criticism 24.1 (1982), argues that the telegaphist
acts in the capacity of a "protectress" towards Captain Everard because of her loyalty, her
sense of duty, to the aristocracy (32). And for Moon, in this sense the telegaphist is a
parallel of the governess of IhﬂumbfthSm and Mrs Gracedew of "Covering End".

26. Susan Winnett, WWW
andlames. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 179,175,180. Winnett argues that
it is the telegaphist's caged perspective and therefore her distance ﬁ'om the upper classes
that enable her to read a competent romance: "Her [generic] competence is impaired when
she leaves her cage and undertakes to act in the world" (181).

27. Gribble, 108.

28 Eric Savoy in "'In the Cage' and the Queer Effects of Gay History, " in lei
Winn 28.3 ( 1995), argues that the telegaphist's "knowledge," which is "a

58

queer mixture of fact and fancy," produces certain effects which in turn produce queerness
(286). And queerness, for Savoy, which is produced by J ames's displacement of sexual and
class scandal-related panics of the 1890s, has double referents, and sigiiﬁes the displaced,
the uncanny, and the oblique. And Walton argues that in her attempt to "appropriate" and
"know," the telegaphist engages in "Masculine Realist activity" which ultimately impedes
her imaginative activity (92).

29. For Gribble, the telegaphist's cage also signiﬁes" emotional and sexu "
barriers (112). And for Darshan Singh Maini, in HennLIameLthelndireculision (Ann
Arbor or London: U. M. I. Research Press, 1988) the telegaphist's cage is the cage of her
"sexual inhibitions and fantasies" (13). Maini maintains that mm: is among a goup
of James's ﬁction that depicts "emotional erosion and subversion" (l3), and gives indirect
expression to James's "sexual miseries" (172) and "suppressed puritanism" (97).

30. Stuart Hutchinson, "James's In_the_Cage: A New Interpretation, " Smdiesin
ShorLEiction 19.1 (1982): 24, 22. For Hutchinson, Mudge and Everard, although
dissimilar characters, are similar in that they "embody an identical threat" for the
telegaphist (24).

31. Aswell, 378,384.

32. Savoy observes that this particular fancy of the telegaphist's "signiﬁes the
cash nexus in which blackmail was comparable to and might accompany prostitution, and
it demonstrates the contingent power that accrued to the working class servant" when the
public medium of telegaphy caused the circulation of the secrets of the upper class
pe0ple's private lives (292).

33. Carren Kaston, WWW (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 1984) 118. For Kaston, the cage is the
cage of the telegaphist's imagination or consciousness, and in it she has maintained a
genteel separation from experience

34. Salzburg, 63.

59

35. Her decision to marry Mudge immediately illustrates that a glimpse into the
forbles of the hitherto idealized Captain brings out an appreciation of her ﬁance's virtues
for the telegaphist.

36. Dale M. Bauer and Andrew Lakritz, "Language, Class, and Sexuality in Henry
James's 'In the Cage,” NeillLOLleanSRexim 14.3 (1987): 69. Bauer and Lakritz argue that
the telegaphist's decision to marry Mudge immediately is because her knowledge of
Everard's destitution awakens her to an apprehension of the material, sexual damage that
she herself suﬁ‘ers through her association with him. She realizes, according to Bauer and
Lakritz, that she "cannot interpret her way out of her social position any more than she
can transcend the limits of her imagination or class", and therefore she is "scared into
marriage" (69). For, trapped "in the cage of language, class, and sexuality," she sees
marriage as her "only security" (69).

Chapter 2

SPENCER BRYDON'S AESTHETIC QUEST
IN THE "HUMAN ACTUAL SOCIAL" WORLD

As we ﬁnd out from the preface to "The Jolly Comer," to James the author who
writes this tale for his "love of 'a story as a story,” the subject of "representation" is of
utmost importance: "[B]eauty" is inseparably connected with "representation" because
"One's [that is, the storytellers] working of the spell is of course - decently and eﬂ‘ectively
- but by the represented thing, and the gace of the more or less closely represented state
is the measure of any success".1 Like his creator, the aesthetically inclined center of
consciousness of "The Jolly Corner," Spencer Brydon, is deeply involved in creating
images - personiﬁcation, metaphors, sirniles, and the like - because of his deep interest in
the subject of "represent[ation,]" and thereby in creating beauty.2 Also, like his creator,
for whom the "love of 'a story as a story'" is "the vital ﬂame at the heart of any sincere
attempt to lay a scene and launch a drama," Brydon shows his love of a story as a story
when he attempts to lay a scene and launch a drama in his old empty house on the jolly
corner (AN 252-253). Thus Brydon begins to exert narrative authority in that he is in a
manner a storyteller who begins to compose a narrative about "what he personally might
have been" if he had never left his home (169). His quest for what he might have been is
his quest for a ﬁctional narrative through which he seeks self-fulﬁllment. Indeed, at one
level, the ﬁgure of Brydon's alter-ego represents the narrative of what he might have been.
Brydon attempts to ﬁguratively create a narrative of what he might have been because it is
through such a ﬁction that he hopes to create a purposeful life. If James turns to "art," as

he writes in another preface, because "life persistently blunders and deviates, and loses

60

61

herselfin the sand," and therefore is ﬁll! of "conﬁision," then his ﬁctional creation, Brydon,
turns to "art," as it were, because he seems to understand that his own life shows blunders,
and conﬁrsion (AN 120). As in his life he does not read a coherent story about his aesthetic
quest, and thus, as he does not ﬁnd aesthetic ﬁilﬁllment in that story, he hopes to ﬁnd it
through a ﬁction of meaningful, purposeful, well-ordered sequence of events. But
Brydon's self-imposed isolation from the "human actual social" world creates a problem
for his narrative authority (176). Likewise, it is when he rejects or renounces his self-
imposed isolation that he reasserts his narrative authority. It is the "human actual social"
world, say in the form of Alice Staverton, that contributes to Brydon's narrative of what
he might have been, and thus that enables him to make a beginning of his ﬁction. And it is
Alice Staverton's contribution that ultimately enables Brydon to ﬁnd ﬁrlﬁllment in his
aesthetic quest.

As the tale begins, James suggests that, despite Brydon's thirty-three years of life in
Europe, his aesthetic pursuits remain unsuccessﬁrl. He has "lived his life" in Europe with
his "back turned" to such materialistic concerns as the money-making scheme of house-
building, which he conceives as "vulgar and sordid, " and his "face addressed to those of so
different an order" that evidently they have been contrary to those "vulgar and sordid"
materialistic concerns (163). Indeed, working to make money does not seem to have been
a concern for the expatriate at all, for while in Europe, his rented property at home has
provided him with his income. Living comfortably without even the slightest worry about
a steady ﬂow of capital, Brydon had turned his attention to the life of "pleasure," and thus
it appears, to the enjoyment of beauty and reﬁnement, as is evident from his sensitivity to
"all delicate things" and "sweetnesses" (164), or ﬁ'om his consternation at "the
monstrosities" of the swelling city of New York (162). But the "sweetnesses" that the
"wander[ing]" Brydon had hoped to bring into his life, while in Europe, have "fail[ed] him
(164). Thus he confesses to his old ﬁiend, Alice Staverton,

62

"I've not been edifying - I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have
been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange
gods; it must have come to you again and again - in fact you've admitted to
me as much - that I was leading at any time these thirty years, a selﬁsh
ﬁivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me."(17 1)

If he has "not been edifying" this means that he has turned out to be a geat moral
disappointment to himself. And to have been a moral disappointment to himself is to have
been unsatisﬁed in his aesthetic quest, as Brydon suggests through the word "decent." The
"pa " he has "followed" and the " gods" he has "worshipped" turn out to have been
"strange" because they have not fulﬁlled his aesthetic quest. As a result he feels the
conspicuous absence of self-fulﬁllment, for he suﬂ‘ers from the sense of a failure to
eﬂ‘ectuate the "development of ...[his] own nature" (170). He cannot contradict the
general opinion that he has lived "a selﬁsh ﬁivolous scandalous life" because of his own
gnawing sense of having lived a purposeless and unformed life. And Staverton ﬁrmly
believes that Brydon has not lived up to his potential: He is "[ﬂar ﬁ'om it" (171). As
Brydon looks back it seems to him that the only possibility of a "full-blown ﬂower," his
image for the attainment of beauty within himself, has been in the past, that is, before he
uproots himself from his home; and that, instead of working towards the blossoming of his
potential into a culminating point of development in Europe, he has only "blighted" the
possibility of the blossoming (170). It is his shocked awakening into this confusion and
failure of his morally ﬁilﬁlling aesthetic quest that prompts Brydon's interest in a speciﬁc
form of art,3 that is, in composing a narrative (though not literally) other than the one that
tells about his actual life.

And it is Brydon's shocked awakening into the conﬁrsion of his aesthetic quest that
ﬁnds expression in his sense of self-division regarding New York. James depicts Brydon's
self-division even near the beginning of the tale. On the one hand he is clearly charmed by
his burgeoning "capacity for business and sense for construction" and dismisses his own

involvement in "vulgar[ity]" and "sordid[ness]," and on the other he is appalled by the

63

vulgarity of the displayed products of New York's entrepreneurial activity (163). As
Annette Benert describes Brydon, he is an embodiment of "all the contradictions of the
heroic age of capitalism. "4 With glaring inconsistency Brydon ﬁnds the products of the
environment's entrepreneurial activity distasteful to his aesthetic sensibility. Thus to go to
Staverton's small house he has to pick his way through

the dreadful multiplied numberings which seem[] to him to reduce the

whole place to some vast ledgerpage, overgown, fantastic, of ruled and

criss-crossed lines and ﬁgures - ...the vast wilderness of the wholesale,

through the mere goss generalization of wealth and force and success

(163-164).
"His image of the "criss-crossed lines and ﬁgures" through which he intends to give
expression to the disorderliness and inharmoniousness of the "goss" modern American
milieu of "wealth and force and success" and which ends up by giving expression to the
marks made in his own mind by contrary lines of thinldng, is unambiguously Brydon's own
image. For, as the narrator points out, the "numberings seemed to him to reduce the
whole place to some vast ledgerpage ..." (my emphasis). Brydon tries to make a pattern
out of the crossed lines of his thinking, keep account of it all in a "ledgerpage" as it were,
but the relatively simple additions and subtractions have become complex multiplications
and divisions - multiplications of his confusions and divisions of his values. It seems to him
that he has betrayed his aesthetic, moral, emotional, and spiritual values with his newly
surfacing penchant for materialistic values: "There are values other than the beastly rent-
values, and in short, in short -! " he exclaims in exasperation during one of his
conversations with Staverton (167). With his return to what has now become the
thoroughly unfamiliar environment of his native New York, Brydon becomes so
distressingly aware of the frustration of his aesthetic pursuits that he ﬁnds all his
"[p]roportions and values ...upside down" (162). Brydon claims to cherish his house on
the "jolly corner," which again the narrator clearly points out to be the center of

consciousness's term ("he usually described it"), because of all the moral, emotional,

64

and spiritual values that it signiﬁes for him, but instead of giving life to these intangible
values by living in this house, he chooses to live in a hotel and ironically let the "jolly"
corner stand in the dolorous solemnity of conspicuous desolation (162). Indeed, he cannot
live on the jolly corner with his return to America because his contrary impulses have not
intersected to merge into a harmonious whole. It seems to him that his only hope of unity
has been in the past when his "alter ego" "had" been "within" him (170). Thus it seems to
him that only in the past has there been a dialectic between his ego and alter ego, a chance
at the exquisite synthesis that he envisions in his metaphor of "the full-blown ﬂower". But
as James points out through this metaphor of the ﬂower, Brydon is so conﬁrsed at this
point that even as he implicitly suggests the union of his ego and alter ego through the
metaphor, he explicitly situates the full-blown ﬂower in the alter ego alone.

Nevertheless, Brydon's image of the full-blown ﬂower is one of the several images
he creates that are worth noticing because of the part they play in his eﬂ‘orts to read or
create order and meaning through aesthetic means. Brydon's deep involvement with
literary concerns, for example, his concern for "irony" and "imagination" or for literary
"terms" and "comparisons," and consequently, his creative turn with images, reveal the
process through which he exerts narrative authority (167, 175). The ﬁrst of these images
is his interpretation of Alice Staverton's small house: "the charm of his having encountered
and recognized, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, ...a small still scene where
economy hung about like the scent of a garden" (164). As James points out through the
narrator's voice, then, this image too is unambiguously Brydon's own, that is, something
which the center of consciousness does not share with the narrator. Staverton has brought
such order into her ﬁugal home that the aesthetically inclined Brydon is thoroughly
charmed by it and therefore attempts to articulate his impression through a sirnile. He does
not wish to limit himself to the visual image of "a garden" because he is particularly struck
by the subtlety and delicacy of Staverton's home, and so he goes on to create an olfactory

image as well. This shows his concern for careful and clear expression. The desire to steer

65

clear of a "cloud of words" and to create word pictures that suggest and represent ideas
and feelings and that communicate meaning with reﬁnement and beauty is what Brydon's
tendency to make images reveals (168).

And representation, as "The Jolly Corner" suggests, is the eﬁ‘ect of the faculty of
wonder. To wonder is to continue to ponder, inquire, speculate, that is, to watch and
interpret. To wonder is to feel awe, astonishment, admiration. And James is emphatic
about Brydon's ability to wonder: he is always "wonder[ing,]" either about his "situation"
or about a "fact" (180), either about an idea or about an emotion. It is because he wonders
that he comes to possess "the most wonderful hour" late in the tale (189). To wonder is to
guess and to make thought productive. To wonder, then, is to enhance the imaginative
faculty. Thus it is Brydon's "wondermen " that leads him early in the tale to conceive his
"image" of what he might have been as "some strange ﬁgure" (165). And it is because
Brydon "keep[s] for ever wondering" that his image expands to a narrative (169-170). In
his ability to wonder, then, J ames's protagonist is like James the storyteller. For, in the
preface to this tale, the author points out that his "love of 'a story as a story," and
consequently, his "attempt to lay a scene and launch a drama" is inseparable from his
"appeal to wonder" (AN 252-253). He refers to the "blest faculty of wonder as the "star"
under which the author "will gather in what he shall most seek to represent" (AN
253,254). It then is the guiding light that James the author depends upon to illuminate his
images. For it is what James wonders most about that he "seek[s] to represent" (AN 254).

Thus it is Brydon's personiﬁed "image" of what he might have been, that is the
product of his "wanton wonderment," with which James clearly illustrates how his

protagonist begins to exert narrative authority:

It had begun to be present to him after the ﬁrst fortnight, it had broken out
with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him
there - and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or
at least, not a little, thrilled and ﬂushed with it - very much as he might
have been met by some strange ﬁgure, some unexpected occupant, at a

66

turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy
quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it
by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would
have made sure of ﬁnding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void,
and yet so coming, with a geat suppressed start, on some quite erect
confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and
facing him through the dusk. (165).

Clearly, at this point, Brydon develops his metaphors so that they reveal the beginning of
his gasp over narrative connections. Thus his "image" in this passage reveals how he
begins to create a ﬁctitious shadowy character, a setting, and scenes in a narrative ﬁction:
He conceives the "image" of "dim passages of an empty house" and of "some strange
ﬁgure" that has become an "unexpected occupan " in that empty house, which he develops
into a scene of suspense with his meeting this strange occupant "at a turn of one of the
dim passages". Brydon even moves on to "improve" his "quaint analogy" by changing the
scene in which he meets the strange occupant from the dim passages of an empty house to
"a room shuttered and void". Further, the "unexpected occupant" in this scene develops
into an "erect conﬁonting presence," which looms up in the dark and empty room. He also
develops the scene in that he adds to the dramatic "intens[ity]" by sketching the element of
emotion ("a geat suppressed start, ") at the unexpected encounter.

And Brydon continues to develop this element of emotion as he continues to

concentrate on his conception of the ﬁgure that represents what he might have been:

He had always caught the ﬁrst eﬂ‘ect of the steel point of his stick on the
old marble of the hall pavement... This eﬁ'ect was the dim reverberating
tinkle as of some far-oﬂ‘ bell hung .. in the depths of the house, of the past,
of that mystical other world that might have ﬂourished for him... On this
impression he put his stick noiselessly away feeling the place once
more in the likeness of some geat glass bowl, all precious concave crystal,
set delicately humming by the play of a moist ﬁnger round its edge. The
concave crystal held this mystical other world, and the indescribably ﬁne
murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his
strained ear, of all the old bafﬂed forsworn possibilities. (174)

67

The jolly corner, the setting of his narrative ﬁction of what he might have been, seems to
ﬁll with "the slow opening bars of some rich music" (174). This image of an aesthetically
pleasing, melodious, and powerful instrumental music represents for Brydon the
development of meaning and purpose, and of his strong sense of harmony, or his strong
belief in the construction of a purposeﬁil world of ﬁction. It therefore is comparable to the
"rich music" of a delightﬁil concerto. But the image of instrumental sounds is an overture
that heralds the image of human sounds. Indeed, Brydon carefully continues to build his
sense of "the conscious human resonance" (167). Thus, as his stick touches the marble
squares of his childhood and his youth, the "rich music" gadually diminishes into "the dim
reverberating tinkle ...of some far-oﬂ‘ bell". It is as though Brydon is preparing the stage
for the human drama to begin. Therefore the instrumental music gives way to a
"humming" sound. And as the drama increases, the bum is replaced by a "murmur"
followed by " sigh, " and a "pathetic wail". It is as though, like his creator, who writes in his
preface that the "excitement, amusement, thrill and ...suspense" of a "story" is in the
development of "the human emotion," the reﬂector understands the drama of human
emotion (AN 25 7). The suggestion here is that Brydon's conception of his personiﬁed
ﬁgure of what he might have been continues to develop the human element so persistently
that not only does the image of instrumental music give way to the image of human
sounds, but the sounds themselves show Brydon's increasing awareness of the drama of
human emotion. For, at this point, his "old baﬂled forsworn possibilities" have increasingly
begun to take a human form.

Brydon then has developed his image of the personiﬁed ﬁgure, the vague and dim
"presence" that represents "all the old baﬂled forsworn possibilities" of his life, to give
them one speciﬁc "Form" based on "veiisimilitude" (174,175). His conception of the
image of one full-blown ﬂower, or "a small still scene" (164), or "some geat glass bowl,
all precious concave crystal,"5 or one concerto of "rich music" clearly illustrates his desire

to harness all his contradictory impulses and create a harmonious whole for himself (174).

68

And the form under which he thinks he has united "all" his "old bafﬂed forsworn
possibilities" is the ﬁgure of his "alter ego, " the other self he could or would have become
if he had stayed at home (175).6 Brydon even goes on to "wake" all his old and rejected
unexplored potential "into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy" (174). He
does not conceive several separate narratives for his several rejected and unexplored
"possibilities," but one narrative ﬁction of a particular kind for all of them. In effect, then,
to live one " ghostly life" is for all those possibilities to come together, to cohere and
connect, and to become a ghostly alter ego that represents one imaginary life, and
consequently, that represents one narrative ﬁction. Brydon hopes to visualize the
apparition "telescopically," at the "far end" of a clear vista, ﬁ‘amed within an open door,
for this is how he projects "into it always a reﬁnement of beauty" (181). Thus his idea is to
create an aesthetically pleasing work of art that consistently preserves a romantic aura of
mystery, and therefore to study it from a distance but without ﬁustrating the illusion of
nearness, even as though the object were natural or real, and not artiﬁcial or imaginary.
Brydon's interest in clear "vistas" reveals his interest in conceiving a comprehensive view
in which the elements of his picture, and consequently a succession of events of a probable
past, fall into sequential order. Thus his idea is to create a work of art that tells a story
about an adventure, a quest, and a discovery. More speciﬁcally, his "odd pastime" turns
out to be the construction of a narrative that he creates without literally writing it, but that
is nevertheless a narrative whose author is particular about "verisimilitude": "This was the
essence of his vision - which was all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the
house and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was
placed and posted" (174-175). Unhappy with the actual story of his life, he conceives a
different story, an imaginary but plausible one, raised on the foundation of his remote but
actual past, that is, he conceives the ﬁction of what might have been. He has "like[d]" to
open shutters of the upper room windows through which "the ﬂare of the street-lamps

below" or the "hard silver of the autumn stars" above would enter and light up his world

69

of ﬁction with verisimilitude (176). Perhaps it is because of this concern for plausibility
that, for Walter Shear, James's protagonist comes to believe that the image of what "he
would have become had he remained in America will yield him a sense of the historical
reality in which the image might have lived, "7 and for Smythe, that protagonist is writing

8 Further, for Bell, who points out James's use of the

an autobiogaphical story.
homonymous pun through "storey," Brydon, like many other characters in J arnes,
possesses a literary consciousness, by which the J amesian character "duplicate[s] the
actions of the author himself when he is said to be searching for a 'forrn' ﬁom storey to
storey (or story to story)".9 But it is not so much that James's protagonist moves ﬁom
story to story as that he moves ﬁom one part of his narrative ﬁction to another.

As James points out, for a time Brydon even succeeds in moving on with the
creation of a narrative ﬁction of his unexplored possibilities on the jolly corner. The
gound ﬂoor of the jolly corner, with its marble squares of Brydon's "childhood" and his
"youth," represents Brydon's remote but actual past (186,189). And each of the upper
"storey[s]" that he wanders ﬁ'om and into represents each of the parts of the plot of the
story that Brydon constructs on this symbolical foundation of the remote but actual past
(174). Just as there are four upper ﬂoors, so Brydon's narrative about his relationship with
his other self, that is, with the self that he might have been, is structured into four parts of
a plot. The ﬁrst part of the plot, which shows how Brydon begins with a stable situation, is
about how he hunts this other self from storey to storey. Through this part of the plot
Brydon establishes that the problem of the story he conceives is with regard to discovering
the "ineﬁ‘able identity" (178). For the second part of the plot, the rising action, the
situation moves from stability to instability as he develops the action as well as the
character of the other self: he is cautious, shifty, and roams restlessly, like Brydon himself.
Thus, at this point in Brydon's narrative of what might have been, the problem of
discovering the "ineﬁ‘able identity" becomes deeper. And by the third part of the plot, the

70

crisis, this problem culnrinates. Thus Brydon develops the thrill of suspense in his
narrative:

the conviction of its probable, in fact its already quite sensible, quite
audible evasion of pursuit gew for him from night to night, laying on him
ﬁnally a rigour to which nothing in his life had been comparable... he had
tasted of no pleasure so ﬁne as his actual tension (175).

In the climactic part of Brydon's narrative, then, the tension in his ﬁction rises to a peak.
For the character he creates becomes a worthy opponent who is adept at "evasion of
pursuit".

But as Brydon moves to the fourth part of the plot of his narrative, and
correspondingly, as he reaches the door of the fourth room of the fourth ﬂoor, James
points out how he creates a problem for his narrative authority. As the "evasion of
pursuit" continues to gow, the problem of discovering the "ineﬂ‘able identity" slips out of
it and becomes replaced by the problem of alienating that "ineﬁ‘able identity" without
Brydon's intending such a change. Through his own clear structuring of the tale into three
parts, James marks a clear separation here between himself as ﬁction-maker and his
representation of a ﬁction-maker. Brydon creates a problem in the fourth part of his ﬁction
because, instead of executing a falling action and denouement, and thus of moving the
situation from instability towards the formation of a new stability, he ﬁnds himself
overwhelmed by a peripeteia that is directed at himself and not at the other self. This
means that it seems to Brydon it is he himself, and not the other self; who experiences a
sudden reversal of fortune in the sense of a fall. For, in the fourth part of his ﬁction,
Brydon's narrative loses coherence for him.

Brydon gives expression to this problem of narrative control in the image "of a
man slipping and slipping on some awful incline" (179).10 It seems as though his images
have begun to take a turn of their own against his intentions. Thus the image of the hunted

becomes concretized as the image of the hunter. And yet, to him, "the strangest moment

71

of his adventure perhaps, the most memorable or really most interesting" moment is this
moment at which he begins to lose control over his narrative (179). For his failure to
exercise control over his ﬁctional plan sigiiﬁes for him the uncanny repetition of his failure
to bring ﬁilﬁllment and completion in the story of his actual life. Instead of accomplishing
the falling action that he anticipates for his ﬁctional character he ﬁnds that he is hinrself
experiencing a fall. Although he tries to distance himself from his ﬁction with the image of
"a man" on an "awful incline," this image of a man is Brydon's picture of himself as not
already fallen into an abyss but as " slipping and slipping" into one, and thus, as gradually
losing control in an abyss of unforeseen turns in his narrative about the unexplored
possibilities of his life.

Thus it is at this point in the tale that the narrator ﬁrst makes an intrusion in the
ﬁrst person: "He had made, as I have said, to create a baseless sense of a reprieve," and a
little later, "There came to him, as I say - but determined by an inﬂuence beyond my
notation!" (177,178, my emphases). With these intrusions the narrator consciously
separates himself from the center of consciousness, and points out that he wants the
narratee to notice the separation. As the point of view is the center of consciousness's,
James does not require the narrator to make his presence felt usually. Therefore when he
does make the narrator speak with an "I," it becomes noticeable. For Deborah Esch this
intrusion is "to emphasize the decisiveness of Brydon's coming-to-terms". 11 AS I see it,
however, through this separation ﬁom the center of consciousness the narrator indicates
the reﬂectors problem of narrative authority. Thus, at the point in the tale where Brydon
fails to open the door of the fourth room on the fourth ﬂoor, and tries to deceive himself
with his idea of his own "Discretion, " 12 that is, at the precise point in the tale that Brydon
breaks the continuity of his narrative and thus creates a problem for his narrative authority,

the narrator once again makes his emphatic intrusion: "When I say he 'jumped' at it I feel

the consonance of this term with the fact that - at the end of] know not how long - he did

72

move again, he crossed straight to the door" (182). The narrator here juxtaposes what he
has accomplished with what the protagonist has failed to accomplish.

As a result, into Brydon's world of realistic ﬁction the world of romance13 makes
a stealthy invasion. The romantic images, as James points out, fail to become a part of
Brydon's realistic ﬁction where his glimmering candle fails to ﬁgure the light of
knowledge. The glimmering light therefore "would have to ﬁgure his swor " (180). To
indicate the inconguity between Brydon's romantic images and his realistic ﬁction-
making, James points out how, for the protagonist, his digniﬁes seem to be more of a
burden than a joy: "What be mainly felt now was that, since he hadn't originally scuttled,
he had his digrities - which had never in his life seemed so many - all to preserve and to
carry aloft" (180). As James indicates with adroit irony, Brydon's name itself suggests the
word "burden," particularly if one remembers the Old English root, "brythen". Brydon's
load is heavy indeed. This, James implies, would not be the case in "an age of geater
romance" (180). According to Brydon, the only difference between his own and "the
heroic time" is that he does not have a sword in one hand and his digrities concretized and
documented in "a parchment scroll" (180). But he overlooks the signiﬁcance of this
diﬁ‘erence. Whereas in the heroic age the literal would be given a ﬁgurative turn, the
tangible object an intangible context, and the focus (as the allegorical narratives of the age
of geater romance reveal) would be on the intangible values, in Brydon's age of
materialism the opposite, James suggests, seems to be the case: Intangible values are
conceived of in tangible terms and the focus is on tangible objects. Thus Brydon takes his
abstractions and gives them a literal, bodily or "physical" form (180). It is not a story of
digrities that he can visualize at this point but the physical object in which such a story
may be recorded: the parchment scroll. He conceives of his intangible digrities in tangible
terms - a parchment scroll - whereas the tangible parchment scroll in the heroic time,
James implies, would be conceived of as the intangible digrities. Brydon conceives of

"brandishing" his digrities and "proceed[ing] downstairs with a drawn sword in his other

73

gasp" and not of proceeding with his digrities in one gasp and brandishing his sword in
the other. Clearly he would like to direct his aesthetic values toward the incorporeal joys
of a "mystical other world" and has a distaste for a corporeal world of mere "sensation[s],"
but is ambivalently attracted by this corporeal world, and his values are often sensually
evoked (178). (The attraction and the sensualisnr, presumably, are the eﬂ‘ects of his
environment.) It is not surprising, then, that his digrities shrink dramatically into "digrity"
despite his desperate clutch at "Discretion," and even this shrunken dignity is on the verge
of extinction: "The pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too comprorrrising, the
explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name, in such a case, out of the
papers, was not deﬁnite to him" (183).

Thus the narrative that goes beyond Brydon's control makes a mockery of his
aesthetic quest:

He was kept in sight while remaining himself - as regards the essence of his

position - sightless, and his only recourse then was in abrupt turns ...It was

indwd true that his ﬁrlly dislocalized thought of these manoeuvres recalled

to him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buﬂ‘eted and tricked from behind

by ubiquitous Harlequin (177)
If there is irony in the hunter's becoming the hunted, there is further irony in that Brydon,
the author of his ﬁction, or who has been the author of his ﬁction at the beginning of the
adventure, suddenly seems to have become a character in the ﬁction, and a stock
character, a "Pantaloon" for that matter, who is a conspicuous affront to the aesthetic
sensibility (177). On the other hand, for Brydon, the character of his ﬁction becomes
elevated ﬁom the status of a "creature" (however "subﬂe") to a "ubiquitous Harlequin"
(175,177). Brydon's realistic ﬁction, then, shrinks into a harlequinade for him, and the
harlequinade turns out to be nothing other than a "farce". Further, such a reduction results
in the extinction of his authorial role: He is reduced to envisioning himself simply as one of
the characters (the completely gotesque one) in a harlequinade. Consequently he

envisions the other self as the principal character of the harlequinade. Therefore the latter’s

74

ascent ﬁ'om the status of a ﬁctional character to an actual "somebody," and ultimately to
the status of author is, as James demonstrates, a gadual progession that reveals all the
ironic possibilities which Brydon has not thought out in the construction of his ﬁction.
And as such all the irony within the narrative that unfolds by way of Brydon's adventure
points at the conﬁlsed Brydon who separates himself from his alter ego.

Clearly, then, the fourth part of the plot of Brydon's narrative ﬁction moves out of
his control because of the obvious conﬁrsion in it regarding the protagonist. Brydon takes
the subject of his unexplored possibilities and personiﬁes them into a character, which, as
the unexplored possibilities are the subject of his narrative, is to be assumed as the likely
protagonist of the narrative, but then he moves on to conceiving himself as the
protagonist. As the ﬁction is about Brydon himself this move itself does not constitute the
problem, but as he sees a complete division between his present self and his potential self,
he creates conﬁrsion in his narrative. Thus the ﬁgure of the "forsworn possibilities" which
he turns into the self he might have been goes on to take a "sinister" aspect (174). Instead
of giving expression to Brydon's uniﬁed sense of self it becomes the "alter ego". Thus for
Smythe, Brydon's failure is his failure to read, which in turn, is his "failure to recognize the
principle of difference within identity" because of a "predisposition toward a uniﬁed
identity". 14 As the self-absorbed Brydon has not developed a sense of otherness, the other
self becomes the alien, the adversary. Brydon then turns from seeing his potential self as
the protagonist into seeing this self as the antagonist. For he creates an image but does not
know how to connect it to and make it a part of himself. And this constitutes the problem
in Brydon's narrative. For if the potential self is the antagonist why then does Brydon
yearn for those potentials that in his actual life he has failed to realize? It, then, is this
fourth part of Brydon's story that is "the one least suited to his book" because it is here, by
an ironic reversal of roles, that the hunted becomes the hunter, and the potential victirnizer

becomes the potential victim (177).

75

For the self-divided Brydon, their, the hunted is divided from the hunter. Even
though the hunted becomes the hunter and the hunter becomes the hunted, the other self is
separated into "another agent" (18]). Ralf Norrman argues that the reversal of roles
"reveals the typical uncertainty as to roles, " and ﬁirther that there is "not a whit of
diﬁ‘erence" between Brydon and his specter. 15 I would suggest that one way in which
James points out a lack of diﬂ‘erence is by indicating that the hunter is also the hunted. But
Brydon fails to see that the victim is also the victinrizer. Thus, as he fails to open the door
of the fourth room on the fourth ﬂoor, he fails to see the self in the other or the other in
the self. At this point Brydon insists, as his single eye-glass and his single light illustrate,
on his need to overcome all duality and achieve oneness. Thus, although the "black-and-
white" marble squares are always together as the pattern of the hall pavement, and make a
pattern because they are together, for the self-divided Brydon these black and white
squares are separated as distinct opposites (174).

The self-divided Brydon's problem reveals that if on the one hand he turns to the
"human" and "social" world, then on the other hand he turns away from it. It is because he
is drawn to human society that he dines out, visits his club regularly, and even lives in a

hotel, but it is because he is also repulsed by it that he is dismissive of it:

He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations - met
indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and seemed to make out on
the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he
had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who
nright have watched it, to ediﬁcation, he was positively rather liked than
not. He was a dim secondary social success - and all with people who had
truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their
welcome, this popping of their corks - just as his gestures of response were
the extravagant shadows emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of
some game of ombres chinoises. (173-174)

He may be "the welcomed member of New York society," as Benert observes,16 and
enjoys it too, but nevertheless he ﬁnds his social exchanges almost meaningless. Brydon's

problem is with "Every one, " that is, with the community: "'Every one asks me what I

76

think of everything,’ said Spencer Brydon; and I make answer as I can - begging or
dodging the question, putting them oﬂ‘ with any nonsense" (161). As William Freedman
points out, the ﬁrst sentence in James almost always "carries special weight." For
Freedman the weight is in Brydon's intuitive awareness that "'everything' is some sort of
self-knowledge": "the ﬁnal speciﬁc deﬁnition of 'everything' and 'everyone' of the ﬁrst
sentence is having Alice and being himself - as he is."17 It is also possible to see through
this sentence how, from the beginning, James points out Brydon's problem of joining and
separating himself ﬁom the community, which is the "everything" made up of "[e]veryone"
(including Staverton). Brydon feels compelled to beg, dodge, or make answer as he can
because he is deeply concerned about and involved with "Every one," but at the same time
he is unconcerned and isolated enough to serve up "nonsense" to his society.
Consequently he isolates himself from the social scene just as much as he seeks it out.
According to Shear, Brydon returns to New York with the idea of the environment as
home, but soon ﬁnds the environment to be "the source of conﬂict," and this results in his
obvious alienation from the environment. 18 But James tells us that even in the remote past
Brydon has had "few social ﬂowers" (162). And he leaves home "almost in the teeth of my
father's curse" (170). As Donna Przybylowicz observes, Brydon's "memories are ﬁlled
with fear and guilt". 19 His environment, then, cannot have become the source of his
conﬂict now, that is, with his return. And he returns with his aesthetically inclined
consciousness expecting to be mortiﬁed by "the ugly things of his far-away youth" that
earlier have provoked his voluntary exile (162). Also, he returns to New York not to look
at his home but to look at his "property," "his house on the jolly corner" (162, my
emphasis). Thus, as he does not come with the idea of "'wanting' to live in New York," he
cannot have come with the idea of the environment as home (168). On the contrary, he
comes with the idea of being an alien in his environment. Brydon is not always in touch
with the stories of his remote past, stories about "his parents and his favourite sister,

...[and] of other kin, ...[who] had run their course and met their end [on the jolly

77

corner]" (169). As Mary Doyle Springer observes, Brydon sees his life only as pieces, and
not as "a coherent picture."20 I would add that, consequently, in his reference to his
childhood, there is often no story, or reference to a story. Thus in his phrase,
"overschooled boyhood," there is only a title instead of the story; and for the years that
follow his childhood Brydon again has no story to offer, but an even more daunting and
somber label: "chilled adolescence" (162).

As Brydon does not always keep in touch with the stories of his remote past, so he
often moves away ﬁ'om what is happening around and to him in the actual present: "[T]he
'swagger' things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things ...were exactly his sources
of dismay" (162). The "newnesses" that assault his vision are too distasteful to Brydon's
aesthetic palate:

It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also
to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more

averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the

diﬂ'erences, the newnesses, the queemesses, above all the bigresses, for the

better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.

(161)
Brydon attempts to mininrize his own sense of guilt by emphasizing the gotesqueness of
the modern American scene. What assaults his vision is so gotesque that he cannot order
"the diﬂ‘erences, the newnesses, the queemesses, above all the bigresses" in the present
scene of tumultuous proliferation around him into any kind of coherence, purposeﬁilness,
meaningfulness, and therefore can think only of "pil[ing]" them up. In general, then, there
are no stories for him to read in this new American scene but only gotesque confusion.
He is even appalled and petriﬁed by modern mechanical contrivances such as street-cars:
They are "the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea
scramble for the boats" (164). Once again, then, for Brydon the modern American scene is

mostly a petrifying conﬁrsion of scenes, a ﬁightful hotch-potch of affairs which can be

78

"pile[d]" up, but which cannot be organized into a coherent whole made up of connected
parts.

Thus, if on the one hand Brydon's narrative ﬁction concerning his vision of the
other self reveals his interest in the actual human drama, then on the other hand it reveals
how he isolates himself from it. If, like his creator, Brydon is interested in the drama of
"human emotion," as I have discussed earlier, then, unlike his creator, he is not always
mindful of the "human attestation, the clustering human conditions" that "make the story -
in the sense that the story is our excitement, our amusement, our thrill and our suspense"
(AN 257). Thus the personiﬁed ﬁgure of Brydon's other self becomes, in his narrative
ﬁction, "a creature" to be "stalk[ed,]" "more formidable than any beast of the forest," but
nevertheless a creature in isolation (175). His shrinking response to the emotional makeup
of this personiﬁed ﬁgure seems to be in proportion with his shrinking response to the
emotional Alice Staverton who asks him, "How should I not have liked you?" and who, a
little later in the same conversation laments, "you don't care for anything but yourself"
(171,172).21 The human emotion projected by Brydon's personiﬁed ﬁgure of his other self
seems to diminish even as his own sense of alienation ﬁom the self he might have been
seems to increase, and as his own isolation from the "human actual social" world seems to
increase. Indeed, Brydon takes reﬁrge ﬁ'om society in his narrative ﬁction: "He projected
himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and
into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him
the click of his geat house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner" (174). It is isolation
that ﬁnds expression in his narrative ﬁction about the " stalking of a creature more
formidable, than any beast of the forest." And it has disconnected his imagination from his
world of verisimilitude. As James writes in the preface to The American, "The balloon of
experience is tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of
remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the

rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and

79

unrelated: we swing apart from the globe" (AN 33-34). It is this problem of self-isolation
that causes problem to the progession in Brydon's narrative ﬁction. Clearly, Brydon's
narrative progesses as long as he keeps connection, on the uppermost ﬂoors, with the
"human actual social" world as his symbolical action of opening windows and letting the
light of the street lamps and the stars enter into the jolly corner reveals. But on this
particular evening, after "a calculated absence of three nights" (177), Brydon is ﬁll! of the
sense of his having "hunted ...[the alter ego] till he has 'tumed,'" and conceives himself as
having "come 'to stay'" (178). The quoted phrase "to stay" is of special sigiiﬁcance
because it illustrates Brydon's extreme obsession with his narrative ﬁction and
consequently, a deep sense of separation or isolation from society. "He had stiﬁ‘ened his
will against going" (179), that is, against reestablishing relations with the "human actual
social" world. And all he does this night is to roam around on the fourth ﬂoor ("still at the
top") and keep track of the inner doors, particularly the door of the fourth room on the
fourth ﬂoor which has been closed by the other self (179). And he never opens a window
until after he "retire[s]" and "renounce[s]" the pursuit of his alter ego (183).

But, as James suggests with supreme irony, it is only when Brydon retires and
renounces his pursuit that the alter ego, and consequently, the narrative over which he
earlier loses control, comes, as it were, to him. Thus, as Brydon comes down the stairs to
go out of the jolly comer, he notices "a ﬁgure" that stands "as still as some image" within
the penumbra, and consequently, within the " semicircular margin," of the outer door
(187). With the use of an "image" as a sirnile, James points out to his readers the need to
see the "ﬁgure" of the alter ego as a representation. And with the use of the image of the
"margin" - a word he emphasizes through repetition - James indicates the context in which
the "ﬁgure" may be interpreted. It is the narrative that Brydon earlier has been searching
and composing: "He saw, in its geat glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish,
and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his

8O

curiosity had yearned" (187). Vifithin the clearly outlined margin then is the text that

becomes more and more clear to his vision:

So Brydon took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light,
hard and acute - his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his gizzled bent head
and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling
double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button
and gold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a geat modern
master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his
ﬁame with more art, as if there had been treatment,’ of the consummate
sort, in his every shade and salience...[H]e could but gape at his other self
in this other anguish, gape as proof that he standing there for the achieved,
the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't it
proof in the splendid covering hands, ...[one of which] had lost two ﬁngers,
which were reduced to stumps as if accidentally shot away. . .The hands as
he looked again, began to move, to open; ...Horror with the sight, had
leaped into Brydon's throat ...(187-188).

If Brydon takes in "every fact" of the ﬁgure of the other self, that is, the ﬁgure of the self
that he might have been, then he now reads the whole narrative and takes "in" the whole
plot of the narrative at the fourth part of which, earlier in the tale, he becomes stuck. For
to consciously align the ﬁgure of the other self, not simply with "margin" but also with
"art," and with the language of "art,"22 as James does here, is to consciously point out
that this "portrait" reveals an entire narrative, that of the singular American billionaire
Brydon might have been if he had stayed at home, a billionaire with a singular "anguish,"
whose materialistic "triumph" produces the exact opposite of a moral triumph. Thus
through this "portrait," or metaphorically painted picture, and thus this triumph of
representation, James suggests that his center of consciousness has constructed a short
story: "A short story," as he writes in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton, has to choose
between being either an anecdote or a picture I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the
picture" (AN 139). As he is emphatic about the "portrait" that Brydon visualizes with his
interpretive and creative imagination, James seems to revel in this character's ability to

paint a picture, and thus compose a complete narrative, as it were. And the reﬂector

81

receives his gasp of the whole narrative only now because it is now that he stops running
after it.

For at this point Brydon has ﬁnally realized how he has isolated himself ﬁom the
"human actual social" world. In his memoirs of Henry James, Desmond MacCarthy writes
about an exchange with the former at a luncheon party regarding writing and isolation that

is of particular relevance to us here:

We happened to be drinking coﬁ‘ee together while the rest of the party had
moved on to the verandah, "What a charming picture they make," he
[James] said, with his geat head aslant. .. There was nothing in his words,
anybody might have spoken them; but in his attitude, in his voice, in his
whole being at that moment, I divined such complete detachment, that I
was startled into speaking out of myself: "I can't bear to look at life like
that," I blurted out, "I want to be in everything. Perhaps that is why I
cannot write, it makes me feel absolutely alone..." The eﬂ‘ect of this
confession upon him was instantaneous and surprising. He leant forward
and gasped my arm excitedly: "Yes, it is solitude. If it runs after you and
catches you, well and good. But for heaven's sake don't run after it. It is
absolute solitude." And he got up hurriedly and joined the others. 23

Brydon's quondam problem as an artist reveals that he has been obsessively "run[ning]
after," as it were, his narrative ﬁction, and in the process, envelops himself in the "absolute
solitude" of isolation. The Jamesian artist, like James himself in this passage, always
understands the need to form relations with the world around him or her, but also always
makes that understanding by watching in isolation. Thus Brydon, who now suffers acutely

ﬁ'om his self-isolation, opens his window, and yearns to "get into relation" with the world

around him:

The empty street - its other life so marked even by the geat larnplit
vacancy - was within call, within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again,
high above it though he was still perched; he watched as for some
comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage of a
scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base. He would have blessed
that sigr of life; he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of
his ﬁiend the policeman, whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and
was not sure that if the patrol had come into sight he mightn't have felt the

82
impulse to get into relation with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his

fourth ﬂoor. (183)

Nothing in the human world now is too "common" or "base," or too "vulgar" for Brydon.
He now longs for human society, or for some kind of representative of the actual world
because he now comprehends his problem of self-alienation. It is his desperate desire to
establish contact with the actual human world that makes him ponder a failure on his part:
"Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in
the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit?" (184). The houses
are "hard-faced" because he has failed to establish contact with them. It is his "spirit," the
sensitive soul, his whole consciousness, that craves for the signs of actual life as he looks
out his open window. Like other J amesian watchers ﬁ'om other windows in the house of
ﬁction, Brydon now looks to see the "human actual social" world as he looks out of his
window in his house on the jolly comer. Earlier in the tale, Brydon regularly wanders
around the house with his "glimmering light," that is, an artiﬁcial light, preparing himself
for "a considerable vigil" (173). But if in those times he has "known ﬁﬁy times the start of
a perception," then he has "ﬁfty times" also known that "perception" to have "dropped"
(181). Now, however, he has become the acute watcher who takes in "every fact" of the
ﬁgure of his potential self, and thus every detail of his narrative of what he might have
been.

Indeed, the house on the jolly corner is Brydon's house of ﬁction. Finally the jolly
corner lives up to its name by becoming a completely successful house of ﬁction. For now
Brydon ﬁnally understands the problem which earlier stops his narrative ﬁction ﬁom
moving forward. He "believe[s]" in his ﬁction (187). Like the author who writes in his
preface that to "begin to wonder" it is necessary to "begin to believe" (AN 254-255),
Brydon "believe[s]," and as a result, wonders with his whole consciousness, that is, makes
the utmost use of his creative faculty of imagination. As a consequence, the whole empty

house on the jolly comer seems to be ﬂooded with the inﬂuence of the ﬁction of what

83

Brydon nright have been, as his images of the "sea," and "some watery under-world"
sigrify (186). And if the reﬂector receives his complete vision of the ﬁgure of what he
might have been on the gound ﬂoor, and if this ﬁgure, who wears a double eye-glass and
has "two ﬁngers" nrissing,24 stands on the black-and-white slabs, then James suggests
how Brydon is ready to overcome his self-absorption and comprehend the other within
himself, and has ﬁnally overcome his conﬂicting response to the past and the present. If
earlier the "jolly comer" is a name conspicuous for ironic eﬁ‘ect, now at the tale's
conclusion it is a name that suggests the intersection between the past and the present.
This house that stands in the corner of an "Avenue" and a street which show the inﬂuence
of the past and the inﬂuence of the present respectively, suggests the dual presence of the
"comparatively conservative" self and the "dishonoured and disﬁgured" other in Brydon.
Earlier this house has symbolically suggested Brydon's emptiness, but now it suggests his
ability to connect the present with the past, and the self with the other, and thus suggests
the reassertion of his narrative authority (165). If the gound ﬂoor is ﬁlled with "an
illumination of its own," then it is because Brydon successfully connects the actual with
the imaginary world in a clear vision of what he might have been (186). The ﬂuid medium
of ﬁction has immersed the jolly corner and made it a house of ﬁction because the
windows in this house of ﬁction bring in the "gleam of street-lamps," that is, the inﬂuence
of the "human actual social" world which Brydon has been watching ﬁ'om his perch (186).
Indeed, the "human actual social" world around him has contributed persistently to
the gowth of Brydon's narrative ﬁction. James illustrates this even ﬁom the beginning of
his tale, through Alice Staverton's and even through Mrs. Muldoon's remarks. Mrs.
Muldoon's remark of "what one might see," in "tlrim top storeys in the ayvil hours" evokes
"a gruesome vision" in Brydon's consciousness (166). She makes him "gave" with her
comment for it makes an unnervingly deep impression on him (166). The impression is so
deep that later Brydon ﬁnds her "right, absolutely, with her ﬁgure of their 'craping'" (175).
It is her image of "craping" that seems to have acted as the famous "germ," the "small seed

84

as minute and wind-blown" as the "casual hint dropped unwittingly by ...[James's]
neighbour[s], a mere ﬂoating particle in the stream of talk," acts for James himself (AN
119). For it is her image of "craping" in the "ayvil hours" that seems ultimately to gow
into Brydon's picture of a "cautious" and "shifty" and "sinister" alter ego.25 And it is this
intriguing, "sinister" alter ego that ultimately develops into the morally disappointing
character that Brydon nright have been. Her image, then, plays a relevant part in Brydon's
conception of the ﬁgure of his alter ego. But if Mrs. Muldoon, who represents the
common world, contributes considerably to Brydon's gowing sense of his image, then
Staverton, who represents the reﬁned section of society, plays a most signiﬁcant role.

For it is her image of "the inventor of the sky-scraper" that geatly inﬂuences the
wondering Brydon who has started to contemplate what he might have been if he had
stayed at home (165). Her image about the profusely inventive, business-minded, and
proﬁt-making architect (the potential Brydon whose continual productivity leads him to
enormous wealth) creates such an impression on Brydon that it blends harmoniously into
his own "wonderment" regarding what might have been: "He was to remember
...[Staverton's] words ...for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and
deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muﬂled vibrations" (165). Her words,
even more than Mrs. Muldoon's, are a sigiiﬁcant version of the celebrated "germ," "the
vague echo," at touch of which the storyteller's "imagination winces" (AN 119). For they
positively blend with, and therefore become 'part of, his own impressions and thoughts. His
"vibrations" develop into his "wonderment" and ultimately into a personiﬁed "image"
because of the eﬁ'ect of Staverton's meaning-making imagination on them (165). And his
image continues to develop after Staverton mentions that she has seen his other self twice
in a dream: "It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated
charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender to his
obsession" (172). Clearly, what she communicates leads to the productivity of his own

imagination.

85

Staverton's image of the entrepreneurial inventor is especially worth discussing
because it contains a miniature but complete narrative. Observing the present Brydon's
ﬂair for architecture and business, she points out with wit, humor, and "mild irony" the
likely development of an aptitude that would be the likely product of its environment
(167):

[S]he had said to him (though to a slightly geater eﬁ‘ect of irony [than

of sympathy]) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If

he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the

sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his

genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural bare

and run it till it burrowed in a goldmine. (165)
Through her image of the "goldmine" she creates a lively picture of the bustling modern
American economy. And through her image of an "architectural hare" she creates a
delightfuﬂy quaint picture of buildings that rise as rapidly as scurrying hare, and of the
mood of vigorous activity. Through her picture of the "awful" architectural hare that
makes a burrow, Staverton creates an amusing, and not sarcastic, picture of the
environment's conﬁdent and accelerated thrust towards artiﬁcial products, a thrust that
culminates in distorting views of nature as well as in aesthetic anomalies. With her
abundant imagination she connects the image of modern buildings and machines with
objects that are as diverse as goldmine and hare. And through her pictures she creates a
succession of connected scenes in a drama of pursuit that is crowned by temporal success.
Her images then have come together to produce a miniature narrative. Her little narrative,
which shows her gasp over causal relationships, is expressive of her awareness of the
connection between Brydon's actual present and his potential present. It is Staverton, then,
who makes a concise narrative about what Brydon might have been if he had stayed at
home even before Brydon does, and whose narrative inﬂuences his own. As Russell

Reising observes, Staverton's comment about Brydon as the inventor of the skyscraper

advances her ﬁiend's search for the alternate self.26 I would also point out that Brydon's

86

search for his alternate self which results in his narrative ﬁction, is the result of the
narrative embedded in Staverton's comment. Bell calls Staverton "the perceiving reader,"
and Smythe calls her "the model reader".27 1 would add that as the "perceiving" or
"model" reader Staverton is also a creator. As Brydon himself is well aware, she scatters
"no cloud of words" (168). Because her words are not confusing but reveal meaning and
purpose, her images develop into a narrative. She tells a story about the potential Brydon
based on her observation of the present Brydon. Clearly, then, Staverton does not separate
the Brydon of the present from the Brydon of the potential present. She tells a story about
the potential Brydon's pursuit of his creation, a pursuit that culminates in his acquisition of
temporal power. In Staverton's miniature but distinctly formed narrative there is the clear
representation of a protagonist who successfully triumphs over the object of his pursuit. In
her narrative, then, there is a distinct denouement. Thus Staverton goes "a little further"
than the Brydon who breaks the continuity of his narrative ﬁction at the fourth part of his
plot (168). Also, she goes ﬁuther than that Brydon because of her clear depiction of the
potential Brydon as the protagonist of her minuscule narrative.

Because Staverton is a storyteller of sorts, her "memories" are organized into
"histories" - stories of the past (164). She has her little place ﬁtted out with the "relics,"
the emblems of her past, and she literally keeps contact with these relics: "His old ﬁiend
herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver" (164).28 Brydon's
own interest in stories makes him appreciative of her references to "memories and
histories into which he could enter" (164). He is particularly interested in her ability to
narrate the stories of their past, and therefore at making the past meaningﬁrl (164). She
even conceives of Spencer Brydon's life in Europe, his experience as a man or as a
wanderer, in the form of stories, of which certain "passages" are "strange and dim to her,
...but still unobscured" (164). Her ability to talk to Brydon about their "antediluvian social
period and order" is her ability to articulate a meaningful story of the past (164). In her

own home she has preserved and brought the past into the present. Her "delicate things, "

87

that signify how she values her past, are perfectly conguous with the present: " [they have]
kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained" (164). For Brydon, then,
Staverton's relics make a charming performance that produces aesthetic success. And this
performance, which strikes the note of harmony for Brydon, illustrates how Staverton has
not isolated the past from the present. Her home is a "still scene," as Brydon observes,
because of her ability to harmonize the past with the present (164).

As she connects the past with the present so she connects her own narrative with
Brydon's. As she ﬁgures out what has happened to Brydon, who fails to keep his
appointment with her, she connects her third dream with his encounter of the other self,

and thus she connects her own narrative with his:

She met it, the wonder she had stirred. "In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in
the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you."

"Saw me -?"

"Saw him," said Alice Staverton. "It must have been at the same moment."

He lay an instant taking it in - as if he wished to be quite reasonable. "At the same
moment?"

"Yes - in my dream again, the same one I've named to you. He came back to me.
Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you." (192).

With her third dream Staverton comprehends that Brydon has ﬁnally received his complete
vision of what he nright have been, and that consequently, he has completed his narrative
ﬁction. With her third dream, then, she reads the signiﬁcance of Brydon's narrative ﬁction
and points out the connection between Brydon and his other self. Thus, as Staverton
literally "support[s]" him, so she strengthens his narrative and protects it ﬁ'om falling
apart, or helps to hold it ﬁom ﬂooding out, much as the ﬁrst part of her name "[s]tave"
indicates (193). Although she sees the other self in a dream, her dream of Brydon's other
self is her own narrative ﬁction of his other self, the self that he might have been.29 But
because her acuteness of vision matches his own, and also because she contributes to his
narrative through her image of the entrepreneurial architect, the character she depicts

coincides exactly with that which Brydon depicts. The ﬁgure that "advance[s]" towards

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Brydon does not advance "for aggession" but "as for aggession," that is, it only seems as
if it advances aggessively (188, my emphasis). As Staverton realizes, the ﬁgure advances
for union. If the alter ego comes to Staverton with a "sign," then at last, after all the
tension and suspense, the conﬁrsion and mystiﬁcation, he proves to be no antagonist or
adversary. "And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had - and
also then, from the ﬁrst moment, because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me
of that" (193). This third dream, then, is not an exact repetition of the dream she has seen
twice over. It is an extension that is intricately connected with Brydon's narrative of what
he might have been, the purpose of which is to connect Brydon's other self with him.
Because Staverton connects her own narrative ﬁction of what Brydon might have
been with Brydon's own, she helps him to accept the connection between himself and his
other self. She helps him to understand that his "denial" of the other self is not so much his
failure to comprehend his relation with the other self, as it is his "dismay" (188). This is
why James couples denial with dismay, or why he writes of Brydon, "the horror within
him a horror" (188, my emphasis). Staverton understands that Brydon's "denial" is "the
passion of his protest" and outrage, his sense of intense "horror" and "shock" at the
"hideous," "odious," or "vulgar" "stranger" within himself (188). It is this understanding
that is the "meaning blurr " by her smile: "No, thank heaven," she tells him, "it's not you!
Of course it wasn't meant to have been," which makes Brydon gently insist, "Ah but it
was" (191). Thus she takes him to the point where she can ask "Isn't the whole point that
you'd have been different?" which question has "the breath of infallibility" for him (192).
Indeed, Brydon's "horror" shows that he is no longer as self-absorbed as he has been, and
therefore that he does receive a glimpse of the other in himself. For, clearly, there would
have been no geat "horror" for Brydon if he could have conceived the other self as a
"stranger". Staverton then helps him to overcome his denial, a denial that shows his initial
gudge and resentment at having to accept the other in himself. He may ﬁnd it diﬁicult,30

but he gadually learns to accept the connection:

89

But though it all brought for him ...a dim light, "You 'pitied' him?" he gudgingly,
resentftu asked.

"He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged," she said.

"And haven't I been unhappy? Am not I - you've only to look at me! - ravaged?"

"Ah I don‘t say I like him better,‘ she ganted after a thought. 'But he's grim, he's
worn - and things have happened to him. He doesn't make shift, for sight, with your
charming monocle. "

"No"- it struck Brydon: "I couldn't have sported mine 'downtown.‘ They'd have
guyed me there." (193)

Brydon gadually begins to see "a dim light" when she tells him of her pity for the
character she envisions in her dream, that is, for the character in her own narrative. For if
she can pity the odious and the vulgar, then Brydon certainly is not going to be a source of
disappointment and disillusion for her. The "dim light" that is suggestive of Brydon's
gadual acceptance of his connection with the other self is J ames's way of pointing out that
what Brydon gudges and resents is his own connection to the odious and the vulgar. The
"dim light" is also James's way of illuminating for his readers the parallels that Brydon
draws between himself and his other self: Like the other self he is "unhappy" and
"ravaged".31 Further, he goes on to picture himself in the other selfs position
"downtown." And when Brydon "wince[s] - whether for his proved identity or for his lost
ﬁngers," James implies in his subtle, ironic, indirect way Brydon's awareness of the
"horror" and the other within himself (193). I, however, do not mean to imply that there is
no ambiguity in the text regarding the issue of Brydon's identity with the other self. As
Tzvetan Todorov argues, it is indeed uncertain whether Brydon is identiﬁed with or
different from the other self: "The Other is and is not himself. "32 And like Todorov,
Donald Burleson asserts that James leaves his readers in hermeneutic uncertainty as to
whether or not Brydon is conﬂated with his other self.33 But even when James leaves his
readers in uncertainty regarding Brydon's identity with or diﬂ‘erence ﬁom the other self, he
still suggests Brydon's empathic awareness of the "lost ﬁngers." Brydon may either wince
"for his proved identity" with the other self then, or because, with his sympathetic
imagination, he himself feels the pain of the loss of ﬁngers34 And that is enough to

90

suggest that he has begun to accept the other in himself. And this acceptance is the result
of the connection between Brydon's narrative ﬁction with Staverton's.

As James implies, then, Brydon's meaning-making activities, and consequently his
exercise of narrative authority, are inextricably connected with the "human actual social"
world. Thus on regaining consciousness it seems to Brydon that he has been "picked up
...[ﬁ'om] the uttermost end of an interminable gey passage" (189). The "interminable gey
passage" represents, at one level, the concluding passage, the denouement of moral
desolation and the doom of isolation that he reads in his narrative ﬁction of what he might
have been. If Staverton picks him up from this "gey passage" where the shocked and
overwhelmed Brydon loses consciousness then it is because she understands Brydon's
shock and bewilderment at the odious, lonely, and vulgar stranger within himself. The
gey passage illustrates the emptiness of isolation from which Staverton relieves him by
"pick[ing]" him up into her arms. As Benert observes, Staverton encourages Brydon to
outgow "a fantasy of male isolation" that he "seems determined to enact".35 I would go
ﬁlrther and say that Staverton's emphasis on togetherness, that is, her emphasis on "their
common social period and order" expresses her awareness that meaning-making
activities cannot occur in isolation (164). As he depends on her for comprehension - 'As I
didn't turn up you came straight -?" so she depends on him for the same - "In the cold dim
dawn, you say?" Together they try to make sense of their experiences. And together they
connect Brydon's loss of consciousness with the return of his consciousness. With
Staverton at his side, Brydon is conﬁdent that he will be able to read meaning where he
has failed to, for he feels "a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him for quiet
appropriation" (189).

Thus it is because of the connection between his own narrative ﬁction with
Staverton's that Brydon ultimately moves away from apparitions and an apparitional world
into the "human actual social" world of fact where he gives and receives love to and ﬁom

the other (Staverton). The creation of his ﬁctional narrative yields Brydon his particular

91

human individuality, his self-identity, the identity which cannot be linrited to that of the
"gim" and "worn" other self (193). And Staverton conﬁrms it when she murmurs, "And
he isn't - no, he isn't - you!" (193). As Carren Kaston observes, Staverton seems to oﬁ'er
Brydon "a freeing identiﬁcation in the belief that Brydon is whole now, rather than a
ghostly part."36 Indeed, the alter ego acts in the capacity of synecdoche, and Staverton's
comment, "he isn't you" is indicative of her solution to the problem of the literalization
of synecdoche. As the last exchange between Brydon and Staverton in the end of the tale
seems to signify, the other self is only a part and not the whole of Brydon. Thus, although
readers like Stein may argue that "Brydon has accomplished little, either in the world of
art or intellect or in terms of his human relations," James shows quite the opposite. 3 7
Brydon has learned to "piec[e] together the parts" of his narrative ﬁction about what he
might have been with Staverton's, and as a result, ﬁnds the relation of love (191).
Consequently, it is through the making of a narrative ﬁction, which helps him to
forge a meaningful relation with Staverton, that Brydon ﬁnally ﬁilﬁlls his aesthetic quest.
As J arnes points out in the denouement of his ﬁction, with the return of his consciousness
the protagonist experiences "the most wonderﬁil hour, little by little, that he had ever
known" (189). Now as he "wonder[s]" he ﬁnds a wonderful subject to wonder about:
despite his fall he ﬁnds himself "all so wondrously without bruise or gash, " and "as much
at peace as if he had had food and drink" (190). For he has at last found "the beauty of his
state" which "resemble[s] more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some
news of a geat inheritance, and then, after dreaming it away, has waked up again to
serenity of certitude" (189). Thus now for Brydon physical, tangible objects are no longer
a source of conﬁrsion.38 Corporeal values have ultimately become the vehicles to
represent incorporeal values. Tangible property now represents intangible love. Indeed he
has risen far above the self-absorbed and corporeal frame of mind in which he objectiﬁes
Staverton "as some pale pressed ﬂower" that, "failing other sweetnesses," is "a sufﬁcient

reward for his eﬂ‘ort" (164). Thus now Staverton's "look ...[is] more beautiful to him than

92

the things of this world" (192). According to Tuveson, at the tale's conclusion Brydon
moves to a "better spiritual condition than he has experienced before."39 I would also
suggest that at the tale‘s conclusion aesthetic fulﬁllment becomes one with spiritual
fulﬁllment for Brydon. Finally Brydon has found a morally satisfying aesthetic ﬁrlﬁllment.
For in Staverton's look he ﬁnds the ﬁrsion of the aesthetic and the spiritual worlds. Thus,
because he exerts narrative authority in connection with the "human actual social" world,
Brydon ultimately effects the connection between aesthetic and spiritual attainment. It is
not this world itself that ﬁllﬁlls his aesthetic quest, but the connections he learns to make
as a result of the narrative authority in, or in conjunction with, this "human actual social"
world that brings ﬁilﬁllment to Brydon. Thus if earlier through Brydon's name James
suggests the word "burden," now he goes on to suggest the word "bridoon" (or the French
"bridon") as it is associated with the word "bride," and thus with the language of
needlework, in that Brydon is now able to make the link that joins the pieces of a pattern.
Brydon further demonstrates his ability to create effective connections by making a
smooth transition from the denouement of his ﬁctional narrative to the denouement of his

life's narrative: "'He has a million a year,’ 'But he hasn't you'" (193).

93

Notes

1. Henry James, W (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1984) 252,254. Cited parenthetically as AN.

2. Henry James, IhLIollyLmneLandJItherlales (London: Penguin Books,
1990) 168.

3. According to J. U. Jacobs, in "The Alter-Ego: The Artist as American in 'The
Jolly Comer,” in Ihenria 58 (1982), Brydon has had a "successful artistic career in
Europe" (52). But clearly, it is because it has been unsuccessful in Europe that he resumes
his aesthetic quest, and consequently develops an interest in a ﬁctional narrative, in
America. Further, a " successful " artistic career would hardly require Brydon to depend on
his rent-values. As Jacobs himself states, Brydon's "[a]esthetic values are supported by
living realities" (54). For Jacobs, Brydon has a "schizoid personality" and his
consciousness is divided into "a world of fancy and a world of fact" (54). Consequently,
he argues that Brydon is the self that represents the "European man of fancy," while the
other self, which is a ﬁgnent of the man of fancy, represents the "American man of fact,"
and that both these representations are "examples of the distortion of the self" that results
ﬁom a failure to "reconcile the imagination with reality in a fully integated consciousness"
(58).

4. Annette Benert, "Dialogical Discourse in 'The Jolly Corner': The Entrepreneur
as Language and Image," W 8.2 (1987): 122. Benert argues that
the "jangle of voices" in Brydon - the intersecting languages of psychology, commerce,
romance, and sport - reveal Brydon's conﬂictual worldview which is "a romantic view that
the structure of the tale implicitly questions" (122,116).

5. For a discussion on the image of the "concave crystal" bowl see Lynda S.
- (Ann Arbor:

 

U. M. I. Research Press, 1989). For Boren, the image of the bowl "serves as an icon for

94

Brydon's felt sense of his past," and sigiiﬁes that J arnes's telling of the story reaches its
"crescendo of lyricism" (13,14).

6. For Sharon Cameron in Warns: (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1989) the alter ego is the incarnation or "reiﬁcation" of
Brydon's "private though " of what he might have been (135n). For Millicent Bell in
Meaninginlimlames (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991) this
ﬁgure is a poetic expression of "psychic reality" through which vehicle becomes tenor
(278). Bell argues that Brydon works as "a writer of ﬁction [in] that he sees how analogy
and metaphor ...assist the process by which the hypothetical acquires living form" (288).
And for Karen Smythe in "Imaging and Imagining: 'The Jolly Corner" and Self-
Construction," in W 70.3 (1990), this ﬁgure is "an unacknowledged
synecdoche of Brydon's unrepresentable subjectivity" (381). Smythe argues that 'The Jolly
Corner" can be read as an "allegory of autobiogaphy" (375). According to Smythe, this
tale is about a character who is preoccupied with imagining and not imaging through
which James implies that it is futile to write about oneself because "it is impossible to
represent the self with any combination of pronouns" (3 78-3 79).

7. Walter Shear, "Cultural Fate and Social Frwdom in Three American Short
Stories," SmdieainﬁhonJEictibn 29.4 (1992): 544. According to Shear, although Brydon
has his imaginative anticipations and suspicions regarding the image's "monstrous nature,"
these anticipations and suspicions fall short of "the shocking force of historical cumulation
and the accrued, apparently total, social commitment" that the alter ego represents (544).
Thus, for Shear, it is history that "orchestrates ...the drama" in Brydon's boyhood home
and Brydon realizes that he is "the game in the drama of time" (546).

8. Smythe, 375.

9. Bell, 282.

10. For Walter F. Wright in WWW

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), this image suggests how introspection

95

leads "the mind at ﬁrst haltingly and then swiftly" to disengage its gasp of "the
inadequate, though hitherto apparently safe, world it has always known when a new, even
though forbidding world opens before it" (203).

11. Deborah Esch, "A Jamesian About-Face: Notes on 'The Jolly Comer,” ELI-1
50.3 (1983): 592. Esch's argument is that Brydon turns the tables on his own ﬁgures so as
to "ﬁx their signiﬁcance" and thus Brydon engages himself in "an ongoing activity of
literalization" (594). According to Esch, Brydon is so eager to confront his other self that
he conﬁrses his ﬁgures in the process (595).

12. T. J. Lustig, in W (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), reads in this scene Brydon's turning away from "the explosive
contents of Pandora's box" and consequently, his avoidance of disﬁgurement and defeat
(222). Lustig argues that in "The Jolly Comer" James endows the ﬁgure of the American
businessman "with the metaphors of romance" (223).

13. See Benert for a discussion of Brydon's use of the language of romance and
his "heroic quest" to tell his story. The language of romance, according to Benert, is also a
means to represent "a reaction against the rational capitalism of New York" (121). And
for Benert, the alter ego itself is "a male collective shadow lengthening over America
during the golden age of capitalism" (118).

14. Smythe, 376. And according to Esch, Brydon cannot read the ﬁgure because
he "cannot tell (or admit) the difference between its literal and ﬁgurative senses" (595). As
a counter-stroke to Esch's argument, Russell Reising in "Figuring Himself Out: Spencer
Brydon, 'The Jolly Corner,‘ and Cultural Change," in Iheloumalﬂmatiyelecimique
19.1 (1989), argues that Brydon loses control over his ﬁgures of speech because they are
meant to postpone if not displace, his increasingly troubled sense of his complicity in an
economic world he disclaim" (125). Reising sees a dialogue between a rhetorical use and

an economic use of the term "ﬁgure".

96

15. Ralf Norrman, WWW
Ambiguity (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982) 146.

16. Benert, 119.

17. William A. Freedman, "Universality in 'The Jolly Comer,” W
W 4.1 (1962): 12,13. Freedman argues that through the "constant
references to 'all,‘ 'everyone,‘ 'everything,‘ and the like," James produces "a sense of
universality" with regard to Brydon's curiosity about what he might have been (14).

18. Shear, 544. For Shear, the root of Brydon's interest in business and
construction is his "idea of environment as home, " but as I see it, the root lies in his being

a product of that environment.

19. Donna Przybylowicz, in WWW
WW (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1986) 115.

Przybylowicz argues that because of a constant conﬂict between "a distant past and a
familiar present, [Brydon] returns to the jolly corner in order to relive his childhood and to
undergo some kind of expiation for his rejection of America by searching for his alternate
self and attempting to capture a synchronic, hypothetical present" (116).

20. Mary Doyle Springer, WWW
Henmlames (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 197 8) 121. Springer
focuses on the sigiiﬁcant role that Staverton plays in helping Brydon "to get a ﬂaming
distance" on the disjointed pieces of his life so that he can order these pieces into a
"coherent picture" (121). For Springer, Staverton is no mere frame for she helps Brydon
try to discover his identity.

21. For a reading of Staverton's implied oﬂ‘er of love to Brydon, and of the latter's
evasion of that oﬂ‘er, see John Byers's "Alice Staverton's Redemption of Spencer Brydon
in 'The Jolly Corner,” in SnuthAtlantiLBulletin 41.2 (1976). Byers argues that Staverton
brings redemption to Brydon and she does it by pursuing him just as he pursues his alter

ego.

97

22. For a discussion on James's interest in the art of "painting" and the portraiture
of mutilation, see Bell (284-285).

23. Desmond MacCarthy, Bnntaits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955)
154.

24. For Ernest Tuveson in "'The Jolly Corner‘: A Fable of Redemption," in Smdies
in_ShQ£t_EiQtiQn 12.3 (1975), the missing ﬁngers symbolize the "suppressed personality"
(277). Tuveson argues that James depicts many selves of the mind of which Brydon
represents the conscious self and the alter ego represents the unconscious, the "sublinrinal,
primal se ," and that the conﬂict between the selves results in the protagonist's experience
of the "loss of a secure sense of identity" (275,273). And for Joan Delfattore in "The
Other Spencer Brydon," in Well): 35.4 (1979), the two missing ﬁngers
represent Brydon's ineﬁ‘ectuality for they imply a "lack of completeness and an inability to
take hold or gasp" (339). Also, for Delfattore, the double eyeglass represents Brydon's
psychological blindness. Delfattore argues that Brydon remains immature, passive, and
ineﬂ‘ective because of "his failure to recogiize and to integrate ...[his] hidden self" (335).

25. I do not, however, mean to over-emphasize the role played by the
environment on Brydon's creative faculty. As David Carroll argues in IhLSubjechn
'or' t r (Chicago and London:

 

The University of Chicago Press, 1982), "The conscious origin is never the ultimate
origin. The 'germ' is 'wind-blown' rather than the product of a conscious, intentional, ﬁilly
controlled act" (62).

26. Russell Reising, "'Doing Good by Stealth': Alice Staverton and Women's
Politics in 'The Jolly Comer,” Iheﬂenrylamesﬁem 13.1 (1992): 57. Reising argues
that Staverton dominates the ﬁnal scene of the tale and that such a focus reveals not the
coherent picture of a particular moment in history" but the ﬂux of "social and cultural

change" (51). Thus for Reising, Staverton gasps the interdependent relationship between

98

culture and econonrics, and consequently is associated not simply with the conventions of
Victorian womanhood, but with "a new strategy of feminine politics" (55).

27. Bell, 288. Smythe, 382.

28. For a scriptural reading of "The Jolly Comer," see Jason P. Rosenblatt's
"Bridegoom and Bride in 'The Jolly Corner,"' in SnidiesinShonfiction 14.3 (1977). For
Rosenblatt, "The Jolly Corner" makes several allusions to the 25th chapter of Matthew;
for example, Staverton is a wise virgin, the bride who waits for the bridegoom and trims
her lamps (282). Thus for Rosenblatt, Brydon is the bridegoom - the Christ ﬁgure of the
Second Coming.

29. For a reading of Staverton's dreams as supernatural means of communication,
see Earl Rovit's "The Ghosts in James's 'The Jolly Comer,” in mm
Literamre 10 (1965). For Rovit the signiﬁcance of the supernatural is in its translation into
the moral by way of allegory. Rovit argues that Brydon's consciousness is composed of
three parts, of which Brydon himself represents the self, the alter ego represents the other,
and Staverton represents "the conscience, the integating spirit" (67). Also, for Rovit,
Brydon's rebirth sigriﬁes the fusion of the "se " the "other," and the "spirit" into "a new
union and communion" (68). And Staverton's third dream, for Rovit, is "a direct
communication between the 'othemess' of Brydon and the 'spirit' of Brydon" (70).

30. This diﬁculty is so pronounced that for Allen Stein, in "The Beast in 'The
Jolly Corner': Spencer Brydon's Ironic Rebirth," in SmdiesJLShQnIiQtiQn 11.1 (1974),
Brydon does not change at all. According to Stein, Brydon even "perverts Alice's
potentially redemptive love" (63).

31. For Stein this is merely Brydon's self-pity (64). But as I see it, what begins as
Brydon's self-pity moves out into an acceptance of what he shares with the other.

32. Tzvetan Todorov, IhLBQeﬁgLoLEmse (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1977) 160. Todorov asserts that "The Jolly Corner" shows "selﬂrood" to

be as uncertain as "being" (160). He argues that the J amesian narrative centers around "the

99

quest for an absolute and absent cause" (145). Thus, as long as the alter ego is absent,
Brydon's quest for it contributes to his "quest for self-discovery and self-identity" (160).
Brydon, Todorov argues, "does not recogrize himself" in the alter ego because its
presence takes away that contribution (160). Todorov also argues that in this tale "IQ be
is supplanted by to ham, 1 by mu" (188).

33. Donald Burleson, "James's 'The Jolly Corner,” W 49.2 (1991):
100. Burleson argues that, although for Brydon, Staverton represents a "stabilizing point,"
she is "the very locus at which the text slyly allegorizes the unreliability of apparently
stable structures and the illusoriness of hermeneutic uncertainty" (100).

34. Kathryn Cramer, "Possession and 'The Jolly Comer,” W
oﬂscimfictimr 65 (1994): 22. Cramer argues that Brydon becomes possessed on the
one hand by Staverton who is "perhaps J arnes's most subtle manipulator," and on the other
hand by the alter ego who is the narrator of the story (21).

35. Benert, 123.

36. Carren Kaston, W (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984) 152. Kaston stresses the
"romantic bond" between Brydon and Staverton (152). For her the alter ego is associated
with "love and sexuality" (152), and therefore Brydon’s horror of the other self is his "fear
ofhis repressed self" (151).

37. Stein, 65.

38. For Rosenblatt, however, Brydon's focus has never been on tangible objects.
According to him, Brydon's spiritual aspirations are represented by the narrator in material
terms. For Rosenblatt, then, there is a "spiritual reality" behind the material symbol" even
before the midpoint of the tale (284).

39. Tuveson, 278.

Chapter 3

THE CHANGING OF OLD STORIES IN W

In his preface to The Golden Bowl James seems to minimize his own narrative
authority by "get[ting] down into the arena" of his characters, and shaking oﬁ‘ "the mufﬂed
majesty of authorship".1 As a result, he subjects "the whole thing to the register, ever
so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two characters," the Prince and Maggie in
their respective Volumes, who, although they are "actor[s] in the offered play, "
sigiiﬁcantly are the "reporters and critics," that is, the interpreters, and consequently the
reﬂectors of the action (AN 329). For these designated reﬂectors make us "see the things
that may most interest us reﬂected in [their consciousness] as in the clean glass held up to
so many of the 'short stories' of our long list" (AN 329). The "short stories" James refers
to are, I suspect, not simply the short ﬁction of his New York Edition. Implicit in his
reference to his own "short stories" is J ames's allusion to the "short stories" composed,
although not literally, by his centers of consciousness. For as he makes use of his
imaginative consciousness to create stories, so his reﬂector characters make use of theirs.
Thus, although the Prince "doesn't speak in the ﬁrst person," he "virtually represents to
hinrself everything that concerns us, " and therefore ﬁrnctions as a reader and storyteller in
the ﬁrst volume more than any other character (AN 329). In effect, then, James "get[s]
down into the arena" to allow his centers of consciousness to take control of the "short
stories" within this novel, as it were, and thus depicts himself as sharing his narrative
authority with them. For if the author conceives his characters as participants in an "arena"
he depicts them not so much as characters who perform parts written for them as

characters who act as irnprovisers.

100

101

Consequently, the centers of consciousness act in the capacity of storytellers. Their
"short" or little stories reveal their ability to make narrative connections in their
interpretive eﬂ‘orts which I will show through a study of their well developed images. With
their images they paint scenes that become parts of other scenes, which they paint in other
images. And thus they make narrative connections between their images to form "short
stories". Consequently, it is through them that James depicts the study of the narrative
authority which a storyteller exercises. I argue that if James, through the Prince in the ﬁrst
volume shows how the center of consciousness makes a beginning in the exertion of
narrative authority, then, in the second volume, through the Princess, who for her creator
"becomes a compositional resource of the ﬁnest order," the author shows how the
center of consciousness continues to develop the exertion of narrative authority (AN 329).
For it is Maggie, with her intensely contemplative and interpretive imagination, who is able
to ponder changes in the stories she reads, and also to change an old story into a new one,
and consequently to replace the old equilibrium of the two couples with a new equilibrium.
Further, in their exercise of narrative authority we see both Maggie and Amerigo involved
with stories regarding the key metaphor of the novel, the golden bowl. If Amerigo reveals
his narrative authority as the reader of one short story of the golden bowl then Maggie,
whose narrative authority gows beyond Amerigo's, is not simply a reader but also the
teller of another short story which comes as a result of his reading of the ﬁrst one. And it
is as the teller of the story of the golden bowl that Maggie enables Amerigo to change
ﬁom a dilettantish to a serious spectator.

The scene of the Bloomsbury antiquaiio's shop in which the Prince reads the
" story" of the golden bowl, produces an illustration of the early stages of the reﬂective
center‘s exercise of narrative authority.2 In this scene James points out both Amerigo's
ability as an acute reader in a certain way and his inability in another. As Charlotte
realizes, "below a certain social plane, he never saw. One kind of shopman was just like

another to him - which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that where it did

102

notice noticed so much" (114). Through this odd combination of a heightened
perceptiveness in some respects and an appalling imperceptiveness in some other, James
indicates why he chooses to portray the Prince as the narrative consciousness in the
beginning of the novel. It seems that he emphasizes Amerigo's function as an initiate, in
the sense that the reﬂector of the ﬁrst volume does not strive to develop his narrative
authority and seems to enjoy the stance of an amateur, a dilettante, in the exercise of it.
Thus on the one hand J arnes points out Amerigo's analytical shortcomings as his bias
against the intelligent Jewish shopkeeper or against lower social classes reveals, and on the
other hand he points out Amerigo's acuteness as a listener or reader of the "story" of the

golden bowl:

He continued to look at [Charlotte]. "Five pounds?"

"Five pounds."

He might have been doubting her word, but he was only, it appeared, gathering
emphasis. "It would be dear - to make a gift of - at ﬁve shillings. If it had cost you even
but ﬁvepence I wouldn't take it ﬁom you. "

Then," she asked, "what is the matter?"

"Why it has a crack."

It sounded, on his lips, so sharp, it had such an authority, that she almost started...
It was as if he had been right, though his assurance was wonderﬁil. "You answer for it
without having looked?"

"I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No wonder it's cheap." (123)

As Sheila Teahan argues, through Amerigo's remark - "It told its story" - "James calls
attention to the bowl's narrative status," for Amerigo's remark is "fulﬁlled" when the bowl
acts in the capacity of a witness for Maggie aﬁer she purchases it.3 I would add that in
calling "attention to the bowl's narrative status," James also calls attention to Amerigo as
the listener or reader of the story. For he both launches the bowl's narrative status and
connects aspects of the bowl to locate that story. When Amerigo hears the antiquario say
that he can part with the exquisite bowl "for less than its value," he quickly ﬁgures out one
aspect of the story of the bowl: that it is not made of "ﬁne old gold ...[but] of some

material once richly gilt" (119,118). To this aspect of the story of the bowl he connects

103

another. For when the Prince ﬁgures out that it is not made of old gold he becomes
suspicious of this beautiful crystal bowl that the antiquario calls "perfect" even though he
also indirectly admits that it has a "joint or piecing" and that therefore is not cut out of a
single crystal (119). And when Charlotte gives him to understand that the old bowl is
"cheap," he has read enough of the little story of the "crac " in the golden bowl. The
"authority" that Amerigo's "wonderful" assertion reveals then is in a manner his narrative
authority. For what James illustrates about the Prince is not simply the latter's analytical
shortcomings, as his emphasis on superstitions and omens reveals, but also the ability to
connect his observations to make a meaning, that is, to interpret a "story." And the
narrative authority that Amerigo's creator reveals here is the ability to make this short
story an integal part of his whole story. Thus we ﬁnd an added signiﬁcance of the "story"
of the cracked crystal bowl that Amerigo reads.

For in a manner what Amerigo hints is his vague, instinctive apprehension that the
story of the cracked bowl, a short narrative that has come out of the annals of the past, is
connected to the story of his own irmnediate ﬁrture. To accept a gift with a crack is for
Amerigo to make way for a crack in his happiness, his safety, his marriage, in short, a
crack in "everything" (123). "[E]verything" is an equivocal word, but what it suggests
through its complexity is "everything" that concerns Amerigo's own self. Early in the novel
he already shows an acute awareness of the schism between his princely, public identity
and his private self in his self-comparison with a gourmet chicken "chopped up and
cooked down as a creme de volaille, with half the parts left out" (46). All that his
s0phistication and his heritage seem to have done for him in his quasi-penurious state is to
chop him up and disconnect one "half" of his attributes, which have gone into constituting
his princely, public identity (presumably the "cooked" parts), ﬁ'om the other half of his
attributes, which could have constituted his private identity if they had not been "left out. "
And now, as his instinctive apprehension of the crack suggests, he seems to have received

another glimpse of the crack in his whole life. Thus, as he reads the "story" of the golden

104

bowl, Amerigo, in a vague and barely formed manner, associates his sense of his own
ﬁagnented self with the cracked bowl.

And early in the novel, through his reference to "the story" of the journey of Poe's
Gordon Pym, the Prince depicts a scene that gives expression to his own perceptual
adventures. In his conversation with Fanny Assingham regarding his desire to comprehend
his prospective father-in-law and his bride, and by extension, the American consciousness

including that of Fanny, the Prince ﬁnds it necessary to reminisce about

the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who drifting in a small boat

ﬁirther toward North Pole - or was it the South? - than any one had ever

done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was

like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the

colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat

move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new ﬁiends,

including Mrs Assingharn herself, had resemblances to a geat white

curtain. (5 6)
The quasi-pauper Prince, in all his humility, cannot understand, for instance, Fanny's
motive - which has become one of his "unanswerable questions" - in bringing about his
imminent marriage with the only oﬂ‘spring of an American millionaire, for between his
American ﬁiends and himself, the advantages effected by this marriage appear vastly to be
his own (57). He is immensely mystiﬁed by the "seriousness in them [his American friends]
that made them so take him" (57). Thus in this picture of his journey towards the geat
curtain the imaginative Prince gives expression to his bewildered state of mind and
consequently to his sense of the unknowable element. He cannot ﬁgure out the way in
which the American mind works, and therefore conceives himself as a " shipwrecked"
voyager. He is as lost as Poe's Gordon Pym, and like Pym, seems to be entering the region
of inexplicable mysteries. But in some ways his plight seems to be worse than Pym's, for,
unlike Pym, the Prince has conﬁrsed his "Pole[s]". Therefore Amerigo conceives hirnselfas
a voyager in desperate need of direction and guidance. For Daniel Mark Fogel, the

metaphorical curtain signiﬁes the Prince's isolation from Adam, an isolation that is the

105

result of Adam's "innocence" and of his "closeness to his daughter".4 And for Paul
Armstrong, the curtain signiﬁes the sense of conﬁrsion and impenetrability that is
expressive of the Prince's disturbing sense of "the Ververs' unfathomable otherness," and
its whiteness signiﬁes his sense of their "innocent and unwitting opaqueness".5 I would
also suggest that as Amerigo's metaphor is a white curtain of dazzling light, he conceives
the unknowable element as a tantalizing and blinding but alluring surface. As a "dazzling
curtain of light," this white veil seems to have been illuminated by a wealth of knowledge
that it conceals. Thus it seemingly promises that wealth to his consciousness if he can only
give it a twitch. But the problem here is that whereas it is the nature of curtains to mediate
and thus to veil the illuminating light, Amerigo's metaphorical curtain is itself the light.
And it has become a veil because it is a blinding light. The paradoxical suggestion here is
that the light of perception itself is blinding. And although Amerigo may have borrowed
his image instead of coining his own, he is, even if in a vague, rudimentary and unformed
manner, aware of the paradox. I

Further, what is worth noticing here is that Amerigo has begun to develop his own
" story" out of someone else's image and "story". For, through his borrowed image which
gives expression to his conﬁrsed state of mind, Amerigo portrays a scene. Thus through
this picture of mystiﬁcation and baﬂlement he has begun to develop a story. For he depicts
himself as a voyager who continues his journey despite severe setbacks. Thus he gives
expression to his eager and conﬁdent desire to take up the challenge to his faculty of
perception through the image of the thick veil of "white air that was like a dazzling curtain
of light". He paints himself as a lusty explorer who is not daunted by his "shipwrecked"
condition, that is, his economic shipwreck as well as his present failure to probe the
American consciousness, but who, on the contrary, makes the best of his adversity. Even
his suggestion that perception can only lead to blindness, and thus to the end of his
adventures, does not daunt the Prince who conceives himself as a staunch, steady, and

perseverent explorer. For, if Arthur Gordon Pym is a narrative about how the eponymous

106

protagonist is "nearly overwhelmed" by the mystifying white curtain of inexplicable vapor
or powder and by the equally mystifying chasm to which the curtain leads,6 then the
prince's image too contains a narrative about how the reader in Amerigo is nearly but not
ultimately overwhelmed by the text (the Verver mind) that he undertakes to read. Thus
through his image of his metaphorical voyage, Amerigo depicts himself as an ambitious
voyager and connects Poe's " story" of Pym's mysterious voyage with his own story of
confusion and also with his implied story of the success that his famous ancestor of the
same name acquires through his literal voyage. The effectiveness of the connection
established by this implied story is such that when Fanny discusses with her husband the
complication created by Charlotte's unexpected arrival, she goes into the subject of the
Prince's "connexion" with the illustrious Amerigo Vespucci (95).

The Prince, a little later in that same conversation with Fanny, goes on to connect
the image of his "small boat" with that of his "rigged and appointed" ship, and thus he
continues to extend the story of his metaphorical journey with a subsequent scene:

"I'm starting on the great voyage - across the unknown sea; my ship's all
rigged and appointed, the cargo's stowed away and the company complete.
But what seems to be the matter with me is that I can't sail alone; my ship
must be one of a pair, must have, in the waste of waters, a - what do you
call it? - a consort. I don't ask you to stay on board with me, but I must
keep your sail in sight for orientation. I don't in the least myself know, I
assure you, the points of the compass." (59)

As he "clearly acknowledges, equipped with the Verver wealth, Amerigo's vulnerable little
boat has turned into a sturdy, cargoed ship. It seems that the connection he forges
between the short story of his confused journey and the implied story of the successﬁil
journey of his ancestor yields him his own happy tale of pursuit and success: Aﬁer his
"shipwreck[]," he is now ready to embark on "the geat voyage," that is, to launch on a
gand quest for perception. And Amerigo goes into the details of the connection between

his boat image and his ship image by reiterating his desperate need of guidance: Just as he

107

has been bereft of direction in his "small boat," so he is now igrorant of "the points of the
compass." And he extends his story by pointing out that the forward movement of the
little drifting boat here is followed by the conspicuous absence of any movement at all. For
his "rigged and appoint " ship stands absolutely still. After establishing a parallel with the
historical Amerigo, then, James's protagonist establishes a signiﬁcant contrast by depicting
himself as suspended on "the waste of waters". He waits impatiently to see, that is, to
surround himself with meaning, and consequently to undo the "waste" of his "essential
quality and value" that has been generated by his pecuniary embarrassments (56).
Amerigo's "unknown sea" then is his metaphor for his unrealized personal identity, his
"single self, the unknown personal quantity" that he longs to develop (47). He appears
to be impatient to create "some new history that should, so far as possible, contradict, and
even if need be ﬂatly dishonour, the old" (52). That is, he yearns to create a new narrative
of his life which is about the gowth of his private and not his public self. Thus he extends
the theme of his journey to comprehend the American mind and connects it with the theme
of his quest for a new sense of self.

The image James depicts a little earlier in the novel for the eﬂ'ect of the Verver
millions on the Prince, who is concerned about a new sense of self; is a soothing balm that
anoints or heals him as he anxiously awaits the new turn in his life. It seems to the Prince
that he is ﬂoating on waters that have been " sweetened" by an "essence, poured ﬁom a
gold-topped phial" (48). But this image, as the narrator indicates, is not exactly Amerigo's
own creation. On the contrary, at this early point in the novel, the center of consciousness
seems to be in geat need of the narrator's ability to "represent": "we thus represent him as
catching the echoes from his own thought while he loiter " (48). The metaphorical little
vessel, despite all that is poured from it, is full - it cannot be emptied out - of a sweet and
colorful essence that has enchanted and enticed him. Not only is the phial abundant in
sumptuousness both internally ("essence") and externally ("gold-topped"), but at that point

he, being harmoniously immersed "up to his neck" in an aromatic bath, is the beneﬁciary of

108

all this abundant substance (48). The Verver monetary abundance sweetens and colors his
unformed "unknown quantity, " that is, it suﬂirses his sense of his unknown private self
with a romantic essence. The image of water, then, even as the novel begins, is expressive
of the Prince's impression of his own "personal quantity. " And this dependence on the
narrator for an image proves to be eﬂicacious in that he is able to incorporate it into his
own system of representation. Consequently, a little later in the novel, he builds his own
story out of an image of a vessel on expansive waters, an image that has gown out of the
narrator's image of an aromatic bath. Such is the inextricable connection between narrator
and reﬂector that even when the narrative voice draws a distinction between the narrator
and the reﬂector the relation is not severed. Thus, as Amerigo's conversation with Fanny
whets his desire for a new sense of self, the water of the aromatic bath almost seems to
extend into the expansive waters of "the unknown sea". According to Beth Sharon Ash,
the Verver money is "an ideal nurturing substance for the Prince" and it is colored "with
the promise of his own effortless and exquisite self-fulﬁllment. "7 But, as James points out,
the water in Amerigo's luxurious bath is circunrscribed, and therefore cannot extend into
the waters of the "unknown sea". Indeed, as James suggests through the narrator, the
aromatic bath that immerses the Prince up to his neck is obviously associated with the
monetary "bath" of his ancestors: "No one before him, never - not even the infamous Pope
- had so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed for that matter how little one of his
race could escape after all ﬁom history" (48). Thus, Amerigo's aromatic bath is just
another version of the "chenrical bath" that steeps him in his "race," and the sweetening
essence turns out to be just another version of the "inexpugnable scen " that perfumes the
"chenrical ba " (52). Consequently the waters in his aromatic bath only keep his "old,"
princely, public self (that has gown out of his "antenatal history") aﬂoat (52). And as the
circumscribed water in the bath cannot unite with the water of the "unknown sea,"

Amerigo's sense of self-division persists. The activity to which Amerigo looks forward,

109

that is, the creation of a personal identity that is to ﬁnd expression in his perceptive ﬂights,
then, does not come with his marriage.

Thus at the Embassy party, with his picture of "Mr Verver's boat," the Prince
paints another scene and continues to tell the same story of his inactivity to Fanny (228).
His metaphorical ship at this point in the novel has been replaced by Adam Verver's boat.
For, as Amerigo conceives his situation, his metaphorical ship has failed to embark on "the
geat voyage" in quest of a new sense of self and consequently has shrunk into a boat. The
latter image conspicuously points out the diminution of the comparative stability and
security of the "ship". As Amerigo conceives his relation with his father-in-law, who keeps
him pecuniarily aﬂoat, the latter is concerned with his princely public identity alone, and
thus Adam's ship is nothing more than a "boat".

"The 'boat', you see" - the Prince explained it considerately and lucidly -
"is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the
stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you'll
probably perceive that Charlotte really can't help occasionally doing the
same... Call our having remained here together to-night, call the whole
thing one of the harmless little plunges, off the deck, inevitable for each of
us. " (230)

At this point Amerigo's sharp sense of the Ververs' unfathomable element has all but
vanished. Thus he portrays himself as the bored young man who must stretch his legs and
indulge in splashing about the boat. His "harmless" plunges signify his security against any
apprehension of the veil of unknowability. Thus the white curtain or thick air of
inexplicable mystery thins out and gives way to Amerigo's complacent sense of the
Ververs' inanity, which looks forward to his notion that "knowledge wasn't one of their
needs and they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it" (274). James, however,
points out with one of his supreme twists of irony that at this point "knowledge" does not
seem to be one of Amerigo's own needs as well. Thus he satisﬁes himself with the stagrant
boat, for he ﬁnds relief in "harmless little plunges". Through his image of jumping into the

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water with Charlotte, Amerigo also tells the story of the bond that he has begun to
develop with his father-in-law's wife, which after all is quite conceivable to Fanny,
considering her awareness of "their little romance ...[which] was even their little tragedy"
(89). Through his image of plunging "03 the deck" with Charlotte, which comes in
striking opposition to the implied picture of his superﬁcial relationship with his wife and
father-in-law on the deck, Amerigo predicts the story of the depth of his intimacy with his
father-in-law's wife. His metaphor of the "inevitable" little plunges with Charlotte is his
allusion to his sense of her sympathetic awareness of his "unknown quantity," his
unrealized personal self which Maggie, like her father, has failed to acknowledge and
certainly to promote. To "jump out" into the water, for Amerigo, is to try to get in touch
with his unformed, unrealized personal self. Thus, as this image of the "little plunges, oﬂ‘
the deck" signiﬁes, restricted alike by their social roles that Adam and Maggie have
relegated to them, Amerigo and Charlotte ﬁnd only in each other the desire to perceive
and acknowledge their non-social, private, individual selVes. The more that Amerigo
learns to articulate his point of view in the stories of the relationships between the Verver
father and daughter and their sposi, then, the more capable he seems to become of making
analyses, as it strikes Fanny Assingharn when she hears Amerigo's "eloquen[t]" short story
(230). Thus he proceeds with "perfect possession of his thought to complete his
successﬁrl simile by the supreme touch" (23]).

And the more Fanny hears the stories that his "successful simile[s]" unravel, the
more capable she herself becomes of making her own imaginative ﬂights and "analyse[s]":

She found his eloquence precious; there wasn't a drop of it that she didn't in
a manner catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for ﬁrture preservation.
The crystal ﬂash of her innermost attention really received it on the spot,
and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her
aﬁerthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. (230).

The pictures he paints come together to form striking short narratives which express

Amerigo's thoughts and ideas so lucidly for Fanny that they illuminate her faculty of

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perception with a "crystal ﬂash". The "eﬂ‘ect" of his story is so deep on Fanny, even when
he begins to tell it, that she is already ﬁlled with a sense of "ominous intimation" (229).
The narrative authority he exercises is so eﬁ‘ective, and consequently, his point of view
proves to be so overpowering for Fanny that she can do nothing to counteract it, and even
hastens to acknowledge her "responsibility" to him (233). Thus she ﬁnds herself
contemplating the "beaut[y]" of Amerigo's behavior: "I've thought it all along wonderful of
him" (235). But James also points out that the "eﬁ‘ect" of Amerigo's story is so deep on
Fanny that it makes a storyteller out of her. Thus, supplanting the Prince as the center of
consciousness in this scene, she contemplatively discusses with the Colonel her
conversation with the Prince, and enters the "laboratory of her afterthought" with a
considerable supply of analyzable material. And as she "chemically" analyzes this story in
this laboratory of her meditation, she comes up with her perception of causal relationships.
For she studies the cause of Amerigo's and Charlotte's present attraction for each other,
which, she concludes, is not an uninterrupted continuation "of their past attraction: "The
geat thing was that when ...[Charlotte's marriage] so suddenly came up for her he wasn't
afraid... And ...Charlotte herself had [conﬁdence] to any amount" (236). Fanny thus
becomes aware of the role that Maggie, "the dear little person," plays in the renewal of
this attraction (237). Likewise, she also becomes aware of the eﬁ‘ect of Amerigo's and
Charlotte's attraction for each other: "Maggie's the geat comfort. I'm getting hold of it. It
will be she who'll see us through. In fact she'll have to. And she'll be able" (237). The
effect of Amerigo's story that is couched within his "successful simile" thus is so profound
for Fanny that she herself manages to see ahead into the story of Amerigo's relation with
Maggie, and thus to go beyond his implied prediction of his relation with Charlotte.
Indeed, the amused storyteller in Amerigo brings out the sibylline storyteller in Fanny.

The story that he tells Fanny with such eloquence convinces Amerigo himself to
such an extent that he "take[s] up" the "tale" of his relation of passion with Charlotte: "On

that morning in the Park there had been doubt and danger, whereas the tale this

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afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasised conﬁdence" (250). Interestingly, to take
up the "tale" is to take up the relation. As James suggests in The Golden Bowl, then, tales
or stories have a speciﬁc connection with personal relations. It is as though relation as the
connection between events suggests relation as the connection between pe0ple. To relate
or narrate a story is, in a manner, to relate or connect with another person through
sympathy and understanding. On the eve of his marriage this "tale" comes up for him but,
ﬁlled as he has been at that point with his sense of "doubt and danger," he does not take it
up. Now, however, as a result of the void in his relation with Maggie, who for Amerigo at
this point belongs to the goup of "little American daughters, little American wives," (246)
and of the void in his relation with Adam himself, who gives his son-in-law a "rigged and
appointed" ship, as it were, only to convert it into his own boat that "is a good deal tied up
at the dock," the Prince feels deprived of his ability to act. Consequently, he feels ﬂee to
take up the old story of his relation with Charlotte.

Thus to take up the "tale" is to take up the relation with a certain sense of self-
justiﬁcation. For to take up this "tale" is to read meaning in his life, the meaning that
comes ﬁom his perception of his relation with his environment. And to ﬁnd this relation,
for Amerigo, is to be understood and to understand. Just as he does not comprehend
Maggie, so he does not read a tale in his interaction with her. For there is hardly any
interaction between them at this point. The Prince has saved, "for some mysterious but
very ﬁne eventual purpose, all the wisdom, all the answers to his questions, all the
impressions and generalisations [which] he gathered; putting them away and packing them
down because he wanted his geat gun to be loaded to the brim on the day he should
decide to ﬁre it oﬁ" (155). He cannot, then, organize into the coherence of a story all the
inadequate explanations that he has gathered about Maggie's need to emphasize her bond
with her father at the expense of a bond with her husband. Meaningfulness is so absent
ﬁ'om these explanations that they simply turn into chaotic, explosive material that may

only lead to the absolute destruction of his mystifying relation with his strange little wife.

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The potential story disintegates into the meaninglessness of a "senseless sound" (156).
The void of his relation (an emotional bond) with Maggie is so geat that there is only "the
boundless happy margin" in the pages of their life together and not a story. That is, all the
pages are blank for Amerigo. But in his interaction with Charlotte there is an intense
relation, and thus there is a story that he wants to read. And in this old story of his relation
with Charlotte that he takes up to read once again, he ﬁnds a coherence that is created by
his communication and understanding with her.

As a result it seems to Amerigo that the old story continues in his present relation
with Charlotte, and that consequently it invests him with his Roman life of the past: "The
sense of the past revived for him as it hadn't yet done" (249). For, waiting alone at
Portland Place with nothing more to entertain him than a cheerless meditation, he suddenly
ﬁnds himself watching the "odd[ly] eloquen[t]" appearance of Charlotte, who has come to
be alone with her lover of the old days, and therefore has careﬁilly excluded the Verver
ﬁnery from her attire to remind him of their old relation (249). His old life in Rome thus
suddenly returns to him and ﬁlls him with a sense of his possession of the past. Charlotte's
idea is to renew the old relation: "It's the charm of trying again the old feelings. They
come back." (251). He comprehends the message that is written all over Charlotte's
appearance. For he ﬁnds himself watching "the picture" that seems to be "exactly copied"
from his old Roman days (249). And she realizes that he comprehends and is in accord
with her idea of the return of the past: "'Everything,‘ she went on, 'comes back. Besides,’
she wound up, 'you know for yourself" (251).

Thus it seems to Amerigo that as he takes up the tale of his old relation with
Charlotte, he is already in possession of the "climax" of this tale: "Charlotte Stant, at such
an hour, turning up for him at the very climax of his special inner vision, was an
apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence"
(248). The "climax of his special inner vision" is the climax of his tale of passion because it

is with his "vision" that he conceives and interprets, and thus reads and creates, meaning.

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The narrative thread that runs through the "ﬁne embroidery of [his] thought" seems to
have joined his old life in Rome with his present life to form the meaning of the story of
his life, that is, an external harmony that leads to internal harmony (271). For in Charlotte's
company Amerigo seems to ﬁnd the possibility of the union between his private and public
selves. Thus when he is with her he conceives himself as "a conguous whole" (270). The
"intensity of his accord with Charlotte" is so forceﬁrl and focused for Amerigo that, at the
Eaton Square dinner, everybody and everything become "a mystic golden bridge between
them" (268). Ever since the renewal of his relation with Charlotte, he seems to have
become such an acutely imaginative reader that he can even ﬁnd a place for Fanny
Assingharn's exertions to be included in the Math party as the "last passage of the
chapter" of the story that he now reads with interest and comprehension (271). Thus it
seems to him he is "beset with perception" (267): " [At Matcham,] he found everything, for
his interpretation, for his convenience, fall easily into place; and all the more that Mrs
Verver was at hand to exchange ideas and impressions with" (272). It seems to Amerigo
that there is such a coherent pattern in the "perfect parity of imagination" between them
(283) that they share repeated "identities of impulse" (290). Such is the narrative authority
of his point of view that even Maggie, later in the novel, is struck by the "depth of
unanimity, and exact coincidence of inspiration," between Amerigo and Charlotte (354).
The Prince reads such "meaning" in the tale of his relation with Charlotte that his "whole
consciousness" almost "ache[s] with a truth of an exquisite order" as it ﬂowers in
Matcharn: "There had been beauty day after day, and there had been for the spiritual lips
something of the pervasive taste of it" (283).

But, even as the tale of Amerigo's passionate relation reaches its climax, it
succumbs to inconsistencies. His tale of "the sun-chequered geenwood of romance" gives
way to inconsistency and incoherence because, in spite of the "beauty" he is supposed to
have tasted as a result of the "meaning" he is supposed to have read, his "lips" are still
"thirsty":

115

It [the truth of his harmonious relation with Charlotte] had already told
them, with an hourly voice, that it had a meaning - a meaning that their
associated sense was to drain even as thirsty lips, after the plough through
the sands and the sight, afar, of the palm-cluster, might drink in at last the
promised well in the desert... it was all as if their response had remained
below their fortune. (283)

Having received "truth" and "beauty" already, it is rather odd that Amerigo's "thirsty lips"
have not drained the "meaning". Not only can he not share the meaning with Charlotte
("their thirsty lips" have not tasted what they "might drink"), but he himself fails to
arrive at it. The consequence is a deep sense of emptiness, as the "desert" metaphor
implies. The closer he gets to ﬁllﬁllment the farther he ﬁnds himself ﬁom it. And clearly,
the metaphor of the "desert" in the "geenwood of romance" is an element of incongruity
and incoherence. Amerigo's inconguous juxtaposition of the desert and the geenwood
shows the ways in which he tries to get rid of his sense of emptiness which persists despite
his sense of ﬁilﬁllment in the Math scene. His consciousness has whisked him away
ﬁom his golden bridge and, in the middle of his geenwood, dropped him into a desert.
The "palm-cluster" poses as a reduced version of a geenwood, but even this truncated
form is only like a mirage in the desert, for it is alarmingly out of reach ("afar"). Thus,
although Amerigo's consciousness ignores or resists the change, the story of the
geenwood has begun to change into the story of the desert. Indeed, the unﬁilﬁlled
("thirsty") Prince is in the metaphorical desert because he thirsts for the meaning that he is
already supposed to have found. Thus his tale of a ﬁrlﬁlling relationship of love and
passion fails to produce a coherent picture of harmony.

Interestingly, James suggests that Amerigo's ideas and thoughts regarding his and
Charlotte's "perfect parity of imagination" are represented through images that are
manufactured by him alone. Thus the narrator uses such phrases in this passage: "to all his
sense at these moments," and "His whole consciousness...," or "the idea with which,

behind and beneath everything, he was restlessly occupied, and in the exploration of

116

which, as in that of the sun-chequered geenwood of romance, his spirit ..." and even "he
found himself ..." (283). Once again, then, the narrative voice draws a distinction between
the narrator and the reﬂective center in the production of images. But at this point the
narrator does not seem to indicate that their relation remains unsevered. Clearly, at this
point the center of consciousness does not depend on the narrator for his system of
representation. And as a result the narrator suggests that the inconsistencies which the
images of harmony reveal are the product of the reﬂectors imagination. Therefore James
suggests here that the reﬂector's gound of narrative authority seems to be slipping away.
This is why the metaphorical " golden bridge" of harmony between him and Charlotte itself
" strongly sway[s]" and becomes "almost vertiginous" (268).

Indeed it is because Amerigo's narrative authority has begun to slip away that his
sense of harmony also breaks. As he himself is well aware, there are, in the tale of his
relation with Charlotte, not simply "links" but " gaps" as well, which is why the links are
"renewed and bridged" (249). In Amerigo's consciousness, his harmony with Charlotte is
ironically associated with Lady Castledean's " spacious harmonies" with Mr. Blint (289).
And Charlotte herself talks about their "harmonies" and not about their harmony (293).
The use of the plural implies breakage, gaps, divisions. Thus, even in the midst of
Amerigo's simile of harmony - "I feel the day like a geat gold cup that we must somehow
drain together" - the narrator evokes the metaphor of a crack through Charlotte's symbol
of "the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop" which she uses, ironically, to
associate with Amerigo's simile: "'But do you remember,‘ she asked, 'apropos of geat gold
cups, the beautiﬁrl one, the real one, that I oﬂ‘ered you so long ago ...?" (292). As
Amerigo's "geat gold cup" evokes the sense of true perfection or true harmony, so
Charlotte's symbol of the " gilded" bowl that she calls "the real one" evokes the sense of
false perfection or false harmony.

The image of the golden bowl, then, goes from representing the apparent

symmetry in the passionate relation between the adulterous pair to representing the

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absence of symmetry in that relation. The old story of the golden crystal bowl, which the
Bloomsbury antiquario has read, is the story of a "beautiful old process" of achieving
harmony (119). In this story, then, the bowl is aligied with solid crystal, particularly
because of the use of such words as "perfect," "single" (119), "hardness" and of the
phrase, "lines and laws of its own" (121). To aligr the crystal bowl with solid crystal is
to make it symbolically suggest a relationship of exquisite beauty and harmony. For solid
crystal is a solidiﬁed substance whose components are ordered to form a speciﬁc pattern.
This design is clearly repeated in three dimensions, and thus crystal develops a form which
shows that the external and internal structures are harmoniously bound. Solid crystal is
composed of atoms that are arranged to have a geometrically ordered pattern and
therefore crystal shows or ﬁguratively suggests relationships that are deﬁnite and
symmetrical. But to read a new story of the golden crystal bowl, which has gown as a
result of Amerigo's outing with Charlotte on the eve of his marriage, is to aligr the bowl
with ﬂaws and vulnerability. Amerigo, unlike Charlotte, reads this story but his reading
becomes ineﬁ‘ectual even for himself. For, as a result of Charlotte's insistence on seeing
perfection in it in spite of its cracks, he fails to register that the old story of the
"geenw " (the romance) is turning into the new story of the "desert" (the tragedy).
Likewise, the old story of ﬂawless crystal, of harmonious desigi, and of symmetry in
relations has changed to a new story of ﬂaws and deception, for the golden bowl cracks
and breaks up into three pieces, through which breakage at one level James suggests the
eradication of the three dimensions that constitute the harmonious design of solid crystal
and therefore the picture of perfect harmony. And although Amerigo is capable of
connecting the new story of the bowl with himself, and therefore of seeing an "abyss of
divergence" between Charlotte and himself, that is, an abysmal crack even in his
passionate relation with Charlotte, he ignores it all to read the old tale of his relation of
passion (258). But this old tale is not as meaningful as Amerigo would like to think. Thus

the problem in his reading of his tale points out the problem of his narrative authority.

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It is a problem that shows Amerigo's remissness of the new element of ﬂaws that
has changed the old story of a romantic relation. According to Leo Bersani, "[i]n a sense,
it's irrelevant in The Golden Bowl that Amerigo and Charlotte were in love before the
story began."8 But as James points out, this situation is imperative because it contributes
to the demonstration of Amerigo's preoccupation with the old story. When Charlotte turns
up at Portland Place the ﬁrst time to be alone with Amerigo, even though he "remember[s]
no occasion in Rome from which the picture could have been so exactly copied" for he
"remember[s] none of her coming to see him in the rain while a muddy four-wheeler
waited," it seems to him that the past, as I have mentioned earlier, revives for him with
peculiar intensity (249). The new element of a "muddy" four-wheeler is sigriﬁcant, James
suggests. There has been no "muddy," and therefore a deﬁling, smearing element (the
context of adultery) in the past. And J arnes points out that, although the designated
reﬂector of the ﬁrst volume sees the "muddy" four-wheeler, he does not read its
implications. When he resumes his old relation with Charlotte, it seems to him that he is
simply taking up the old tale. But merely to repeat for the center of consciousness is to fail
to notice the difference between the past and the present, and thus the diﬂ‘erence between
the old and the new tale. As a result, just as earlier in the novel, through the repeated use
of images of motionless boats, J arnes shows how Amerigo fails to move his narrative
forward.

Consequently Amerigo loses the narrative thread that connects the past with the
present. His sense of the past "so handled and hustled the present that this poor quantity
scarce retained substance enough, scarce remained sufﬁciently there" (249). Thus he loses
his gasp over the present moment. It seems to him that the past has "interlock[ed]" with
the ﬁrture, but such an "interlocking, " as James clearly indicates through the narrator,
becomes suspect because of the virtual expulsion of the present (249). According to
Margery Sabin, Charlotte evokes "a rich atmosphere of intimacy, continuous with their

personal past."9 But what appears to be the connection between the past and the present,

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on closer scrutiny, turns out to be the absence of connection, for the present has been
"handled and hustled" out. As a result of Amerigo's loss of the narrative thread, he has

begun to lose his sense of the past, and to be separated from his "present order":

His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back

upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent horizons, to

have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous unaccountable

blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the gound

under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid

shining British sovereigns - which was much to the point - in its hand.

(273).
The "poetry" of "iridescent horizons" has lost its charm for Amerigo because of the "large
languorous unaccountable blanks" into which the narrative of his past seems to
disintegate insidiously. Thus it has lost its "goun " and seems merely "to hang in the air".
In its stead Amerigo thinks he has found an "order[ed]" present that is replete with
opulence, as his image of "a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigrs"
exempliﬁes. The bag seems to be perpetually replenished because we are told that it is
"bottomless". But as James indicates, the "order" that spreads around him and that has
"its" own feet on the gound, does not spread under him. Thus the "gound" that the
Prince sees is not something he is sure of. The man who is unnerved by the "lapse of
logic" (289), does not probe the precariousness of the "somehow" on which his "order"
depends for a gound. Thus the propitious image he has in mind for the "order" that is
associated with authority and ascendancy, "a bottomless bag" of gold coins, is also replete
with ominous overtones. For a "bottonrless" bag that supposedly contributes to the
"order" of the present recalls how the Ververs have bought the "Personage[s,]" Amerigo
and Charlotte, to represent them (255). And it also evokes the picture of a bag with such a
big hole (on account of the "unaccountable blanks" of the past) that it has lost its bottom.

The sense of the whole that the "order" of the present seems to evoke, then, disintegates

into the sense of the hole through which the "solid shining" gold coins implicitly tumble

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down into a bottomless abyss of disorder. Thus the narrator suggests something through
the Prince's image, of which this reﬂector himself does not comprehend the ﬁll]
sigiiﬁcance.

Amerigo also fails to comprehend the ﬁll] sigiiﬁcance of the role that Charlotte
plays in ordering and organizing their "arrangements" (293). For all Amerigo's insistence
on "the felt identity" between his own and Charlotte's plan to delay their departure ﬁ'om
Matcharn, the narrator points out that Amerigo "borrow[s]" ﬁ'om Charlotte, even if he
does it "most effectively" and even if it is to do something that "he prefer[s]" (282).
Despite all his earnestness, Amerigo acts in a rather laggard, leisurely, and dilettantish
manner. Thus, early in the novel he professes to depend on Fanny Assingham to guide him
in his perceptual quest, and now he ﬁnds himself depending on Charlotte to make the
arrangements that he prefers. He wants Charlotte to order and organize so that he can
have the pleasure of reading and following what she orders and organizes. Thus, after
Charlotte's makes her excuse to Fanny for delaying her own and the Prince's departure
from Matcharn, Amerigo ﬁnds "himself making use ﬁve minutes later of exactly the same
tone as Charlotte's for telling Mrs Assingham that he was likewise in the matter of the
return to London sorry for what mightn't be" (283). But as the narrator points out,
Amerigo does not simply follow Charlotte: he goes "a step further" (283). Thus he does
not simply repeat Charlotte's "tone" but adds an ingenious touch. But just as he is
indulgent of Charlotte's "arrangements" so he is quite oblivious of his own ingenious
touch.

Therefore it seems that the Prince simply likes the idea of Charlotte's playing the
role of a maker of arrangements in their otherwise inactive life that restricts them merely
to their public selves and thus to the monotony of playing the social role of personages.
For he simply enjoys reading the examples that demonstrate Charlotte's thinking: "Ever so
quietly she had brought it out, as she had thought it, all out, and it had to be as covertly
that he let his appreciation expand" (293). Thus he likes the idea of Charlotte's playing the

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role of a storyteller. For as he himself has played that role, it can only contribute to the
harmony between them:

He could only keep his eyes on her, "And have you made out the very train -?"

"The very one. Paddington - the 6.50 'in'. That gives us oceans; we can dine, at the
usual hour, at home; and as Maggie will of course be in Baton Square I hereby invite you. "

For a while he still but looked at her; it was a minute before he spoke. "Thank you
very much. With pleasure." (294) .

Amerigo's silent look is ﬁll] of his deep admiration for Charlotte's ability to order the
events and to tell the story of their lives with the Verver father and daughter in advance.
His "pleasure," then, is particularly for Charlotte's ability to act as a storyteller. For to be a
storyteller is to be an actor, that is, to have the ability to act, and thus to ﬁll up the
"oceans" of time not simply with the private physical activity involving the expression of
personal selves, but also with the intellectual activity of planning, ordering, and arranging
the successful execution of those physical activities. To be a storyteller then is to be a
perceiver, a thinker, an organizer, a maker of connections. Consequently, to be a
storyteller is to have a "vision" like Charlotte's that acts for "every relation" (114). This
vision that enables her to perceive relations comes as such a contrast to Amerigo's
prejudices that as he leaves the antiquario's shop to wait outside, the reader does not look
with him inside the shop but with Charlotte as she looks outside. Amerigo does not hear
the rest of the conversation between the antiquario and Charlotte as do J arnes's readers. It
is Charlotte's point of view then which informs us of this part of the action. It is she who
has noticed the antiquario, and she who makes up the story about the price of the golden
bowl, a ﬁction that exempliﬁes her narrative persuasiveness in that Amerigo accepts what
she tells him.

Indeed, Charlotte plays the role of storyteller so impressively that it is not lost
upon Maggie. Thus she goes to Eaton Square on the morning following her husband's and
Charlotte's late return from Matcharn with the express purpose 'of "hear[ing] all her story"

(346). The story she hears from her husband only whets her "curio[sity]," and makes her

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emphatic about her need to hear as much "as possible of Charlotte's story" (348). And one
of the effects upon Maggie of Charlotte's role as storyteller is for the former to feel the
impact of the latter's ability to arrange. Charlotte has not only made arrangements for
herself and Amerigo, but she manages to enlist Amerigo's support in making arrangements
for Maggie as well: "She [Maggie] must be kept in position so as not to disarrange them.
It ﬁtted immensely together, the whole thing, Amerigo and Charlotte were arranged
together, but she was arranged apart" (356). And for Maggie to be "arranged apart" is
to be "vault[ed]" and imprisoned "in a bath of benevolence" that threatens to drown her
(3 55). So eﬁ‘ective seems Charlotte's ability to control their lives that when Maggie wants
her husband to take a trip with her father, Amerigo wishes Charlotte to take control of the
proposal and thus arrange and organize their activities. Charlotte's authoritative
arrangements force upon Maggie the "sense of a life tremendously ordered and ﬁxed"
(371 ).

But, like Amerigo, Charlotte clearly encounters prbblems as a storyteller because
of her desire for the "ﬁxed" life. It is her desire for the "ﬁxed" life that draws her to the
"old song" in Amerigo's "Glo'ster Glo'ster" (293). But the "old song" and thus the "old"
harmony has given way to a new disharmony. Thus the events she predicts to Amerigo
before leaving Matcharn do not occur, and consequently the story she seems to be looking
ahead into does not run its course. They do not ﬁnd Maggie at her father's house, and
consequently, Amerigo does not dine at Eaton Square or in Charlotte's company. The only
notice that the intrigued Amerigo initially takes of this change is to resist it. Thus when
Maggie wishes Amerigo to propose to her father to go oﬂ‘ on a Continental trip with him,
for she does not want the four of them to "simply go on as we are", he objects: "Well,
we're going on beautifully" (3 70). Like Amerigo at this point in the novel, Charlotte is in
possession of the old story of their lives, and resists any intrusion that threatens to change
the "ﬁxed" element. Thus the only notice she takes of the change that Maggie tries to

initiate in the story of their lives is to work vigorously to maintain the old equilibrium.

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Consequently, like Amerigo (as we ﬁnd him until his second encounter with the golden
bowl), when Charlotte "rearrange[s]" it is only to circumvent Maggie's efforts at
rearranging, and to hold on to their old arrangements (367).

But the eﬁ‘ect of holding on to old arrangements is for Charlotte to limit her own
point of view. As she tells Amerigo, "for things I mayn't want to know I promise you shall
ﬁnd me stupid" (294-95). To fail to perceive the new element that changes the old story is
then to "stupid[ly]" resist the gowth of her vision. Because Charlotte resists the gowth of
her vision, she fails to get an insight into Maggie's point of view: "I can't put myself into
Maggie's skin... It's not my ﬁt - I shouldn't be able, as I see it, to breathe in it" (259). Thus
she fails to see the point of view that has begun to give a new shape to their old
arrangements and to change the story of their lives. Charlotte's failure to comprehend this
point of view shows how she limits the gowth of her own point of view. Consequently,
her failure is expressive of her ultimate failure as a storyteller and reader, as her pursuit
and confrontation of Maggie in the drawing-room at Fawnsreveals: As storyteller she fails
to convince Maggie of her own ﬁction (falsehood), and as a reader of stories she fails to
make a hole in the wholeness of Maggie's ﬁction (falsehood). Clearly she cannot close the
ﬁction that Maggie has opened.

And in the garden scene in which Maggie pursues Charlotte, the latter once again
reveals her failure as reader and teller of stories. Not only is she unaware that she has the
wrong volume of the old novel she borrows from Maggie, but although the latter oﬂ‘ers
her the ﬁrst volume of the novel, she chooses to leave both volumes behind. Carren
Kaston argues that in giving Charlotte the "right" volume, Maggie offers her "the new
beginning' which she has imposed on her marriage and on the plot of the novel, to replace
the 'wrong' beginning constituted by Charlotte's affair with Amerigo and the oedipal
attachment to her father". 10 I would add that Charlotte's refusal to take the proﬁ‘ered
volume, and consequently her retreat from the "ancient rotunda," sigiify the decisive

moment of her ultimate failure as reader and teller of stories (538). As a reader and teller

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of stories, Charlotte takes a volume of the old novel and tries to seek refuge ("asylum") in
the old "pillared and statued, niched and roofed" rotunda in a remote part of the garden at
Fawns and which is therefore "admirably[y] shade[d]" by "the climbing rose and the
honeysuckle" (538). As I see this old rotunda, with its "uncorrected antiquity, conscious
hitherto of no violence from the present and no menace from the ﬁrture," it represents the
house of ﬁction where Charlotte seeks shelter in order to preserve the old story, and
therefore the old harmony, of the father and daughter relationship, and of her own
passionate relationship with Amerigo (538). But Maggie follows her right into this old
house of ﬁction, as it were, and triumphs over Charlottle's old story, forcing her to
change. It is Maggie then who ﬁnds a place within the rotunda, that is, takes possession of
the old story. And thus it is Maggie who is left with the volumes of the old novel in their
proper order, and consequently Maggie who achieves the power to order and to make a
coherent design. In other words, Maggie triumphs over Charlotte as an acute reader and
teller of stories. Thus it is Maggie who once again imposes her ﬁction ("I‘ve failed!") on
Charlotte (544). She then comes a long way ﬁom the time when she "couldn't read her
pale novel" (333).

James's depiction of the bewildered and restless Maggie, early in the second
volume, as literally struggling to read a story ("her pale novel") is signiﬁcant because it is a
symbolical comment on her Stnrggle to comprehend the equilibrium that precedes or
follows the problem in a story. When she ﬁrst begins to ponder her own absence of
interaction with her husband as opposed to Charlotte's intense interaction with him, she
starts to ponder the "equilibrium" that governs her own and her father's as well as
Amerigo's and Charlotte's lives (352). It is a strange equilibrium for Maggie because,
although her husband and she, as well as her father and his wife, are supposed to be "a
party of four, " it balances her and her father on one side and her husband and her young
and beautiﬁrl stepmother on the other (3 72). This equilibrium in the beginning seems to be
a necessity because of what Fanny calls the "palpitating tale" of Fawns, which is about the

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tribulations assailing a millionaire as a result of his single status (177). This palpitating tale
leads Maggie to tell her father the " story" about a remarkable young woman whose dignity
continues to gow in the face of all her unsuccessﬁrl attempts at catching a husband, and
which interests Adam enough to bring her into their palpitating tale (170). Charlotte's
entry into the plot of the little "palpitating tale" establishes that very order and equilibrium
that it has lacked. But this equilibrium, an arrangement which Maggie herself initiates, and
with which the palpitating tale of Fawns ends and the little story of Maggie's life with her
husband at Portland Place begins, turns out to be a strange equilibrium for her because it
contains the problem of an absence of interaction with her husband. Indeed the disturbing
disequilibrium that Maggie has begun to read in the story of the empty Portland Place is
the result of the equilibrium of the palpitating tale of Fawns. Maggie wants to comprehend
this strange equilibrium, and thus she exerts to gasp the narrative thread that runs through
the episodes which connect her own life with the lives of the other three of the "party of
four". This is why she conceives Charlotte's report of what the pair have "achieved" at
Matcharn and Gloucester as "Charlotte's story," and why she is so emphatic about listening
to this story (348). She exerts to have a ﬁrm gasp over the causes and eﬂ‘ects of their
strange equilibrium.

Thus begins Maggie's constant and diligent study of causal relationships. Her
desire to study the order of the events of their lives is her desire for a ﬁrm gasp over the
narrative thread of causal relationships. Thus in her conversation with Amerigo regarding
Adam's abandonment of the project for a Continental tour with herself she shows how she
continues to trace a line of causes and effects: "'I was certain that was what father would
say ifI should leave him alone. I have been leaving him alone, and you see the effect. He
hates now to move - he likes too much to be with us. But if you see the eﬁ‘ect' - she felt
herself magniﬁcently keeping it up - 'perhaps you don't see the cause. The cause, my dear,
is too lovely'" (363). Maggie's desire to gasp causal relationships is so consistent that she

even begins to contemplate the "effect[s]" of Amerigo's presence and absence on herself

 

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(340). And she ﬁnds herself repeatedly analyzing the turning-point in all of their lives
caused by her discussion with her father on an autumn day at Fawns regarding Charlotte:
"It had been an hour ﬁom which the chain of causes and consequences was deﬁnitely
traceable - so many things, and at the head of the list her father's marriage, having
appeared to her to ﬂow ﬁom Charlotte's visit to Fawns, and that event itself having ﬂowed
ﬁ'om the memorable talk" (341). Maggie's desire to gasp "the chain of causes and
consequences" of the events of the past is her desire to move forward to an understanding
of the events of the present.

To gasp the causal chain then is for Maggie to connect the episodes of her past
life with those of her present, and thus to move forward with the narrative she has begun
read in her observations of her life as a daughter and a wife. Thus, unlike Amerigo, when
Maggie remounts "the stream of time" she connects the past, that is, "the other time,"
when she has her ﬁrst discussion with Adam in the park at Fawns as a result of the
changes in their lives because of her marriage, with the present, that is, "now," when she
has her second discussion with him in the same place late in the novel as a result of the
complications that have generated because of those changes (503-504). To talk with her
father about the past, for Maggie, is to talk about the causes that have led up to "the
present situation" (500). Thus to talk about the past is to refer to their present situation
indirectly. And thus this talk of the past is not quite what Sabin calls an "empty
conversation, "11 but rather, an indirect reference. If the talk of the past is an indirect
reference to the present situation, then Maggie joins the past events with the present
events to continue reading the narrative of her life. Thus she does not drown or stagnate in
the past, that is, she does not constrict herself to reading an old story that is "ﬁxed" in
time, but journeys up the stream of time and watches the rapid movement of the "whirlgig
of time" (500). The "whirlgig of time" that spins around for Maggie signiﬁes the constant
circular movement of time that enables her to ﬁrse the events of the past with those of the

present. For the "stream of time" keeps her on the move. Thus, as a contrast to Amerigo's

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image of the motionless boat or of his leisurely plunges oﬂ‘ the deck of Mr. Verver‘s boat,
Maggie's metaphorical "boat" pushes "oﬂ' from the shore" and she moves forward with her
life, and thus with the narrative she reads (501). Also, unlike him, Maggie does not
accumulate all her unanswered questions with the purpose of watching them, or waiting
for them to, explode into meaninglessness. Her "accumulations" are there, "like a roomﬁil
of conﬁrsed objects" which she stores. On the one hand, as Sharon Cameron argues, this
scene depicts "a picture of suppression" in which Maggie conceals meanings ﬁom her own
mind. 12 But on the other hand, as Meili Steele argues, this is a means by which Maggie
contains and controls the unknown. 13 I would also suggest that this is a means by which
Maggie collects in order to preserve the unanswered questions. Thus she already starts to
bring order by removing them from the corridor of her life where they may otherwise
clutter and obstruct the forward movement of her consciousness (334). And Maggie's
"later and more analytic consciousness" is the result of this forward movement (338).

For Maggie's imaginative "vision" continues to gow (521). As Leo Bersani
argues, James's ﬁction is "full of visual shocks which constitute crucial turning points for
his heroes and heroines." 14 In the beginning, perception for Maggie is associated with
discomfort, fear, tension, claustrophobia. Thus as she contemplates Amerigo's and
Charlotte's reaction to her ﬁrst eﬂ‘ort at breaking away their equilibrium, she visualizes
herself as suﬂ‘ering ﬁ'om a complete inability to move or stir, or as prevented ﬁ'om moving
up: "it now arched over the Princess's head like a vault of bold span that important
communication between them on the subject couldn't have failed of being immediate"
(3 54). Perception at this point creates such violence in her imagination because all the
observable material accumulating unconsciously in her memory has gown so considerably
that it now arches out and forces its way into her shocked consciousness. She has to
struggle to keep her "head," and thus her eyes, above "the dizzying smothering welter" of
observable material that ﬂoods her consciousness so overwhelmingly that it tries to pull

her down into the "submarine depths" of bafﬂement (354). Nicola Bradbury argues that

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the image of "the dizzying, smothering welter" depicts a picture of "stiﬂing" but more
importantly, of "rich immersion" of the self, and thus of being in the inside, as does
Maggie's image of the "bath of benevolence" (355), while her image of the goldﬁsh bowl
depicts a picture of looking from the outside. 15 Consequently for Bradbury, Maggie takes
up "a double posture, doing what both author and readers attempt." 1 5 I would go
ﬁrrther and say that James indicates Maggie's double posture of being inside and outside,
of being and seeing, in the immersion image itself. For even when she is immersed in "the
dizzying, smothering welter," or in a "bath of benevolence," she gets her head "above" and
thus out of the water, and "manage[s] to see" what happens to and around her (3 54,355).
Indwd, immersion and seeing have become such a habit for Maggie that she goes on to
conceive herself and the other three members of her goup as restless, tense, and wary
watchers who continue to see and be seen while immersed in the watery element of
instability, and who have become suﬁciently conscious of seeing and being seen in this
watery element to have become "like a party of panting goldﬁsh" (524).

Maggie's determination to keep her head "always" above the submarine depths
enables her to overcome each of her spells of perceptual "pauses and tinridities" with "a
ﬁrrther and lighter spring" (3 56). Consequently, every time her imaginative consciousness
plummets into conﬁision, it soars higher up. Thus from the submarine depths of quasi-
irnperceptibility it ultimately rises up into the open upper air of intuitive perception: "Her
comprehension soared so high that... [it seemed to her she was] hanging over a garden in
the dar " (528). Thus her imagination moves ﬁ'om hearing what her father says "to
himself" (510) to looking "with Charlotte's gave eyes" (521) and to visualizing Amerigo's
"pale hard gimace" (529). For unlike Charlotte, Maggie gadually learns to get into
others' "skin" with such ﬁ'equency that she ﬁnds herself imagining their points of view.
Mark Seltzer argues that Maggie's emphatic identiﬁcation with Charlotte, her adversary or
rival, is expressive of the "entanglement between love and power in The Golden Bowl":

"Maggie controls precisely through a power of sympathy. "16 I would add that this

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intermingling of love and power enables Maggie to develop her perceptive imagination so
thoroughly that she comes to be in possession of others' points of view.

Consequently, her imaginative consciousness moves ﬁorn the darkness of "the ﬁrst
dawn" of soaring comprehension to "the immensity of light" and rises upward so
considerably that, as she looks out her window at F awns in the afternoon, it seems to her
that she gazes out of a "castle-tower on a rock" (537). Unlike Amerigo, who ﬁnds himself
"alienated" ﬁ'om "the Castello proper that had formerly stood up on the pedestal of
its mountain-slope, showing beautifully blue ﬁ'om afar," and who therefore cannot quite
reach this beautiful "head and ﬁ'ont of the princedom" that seems to recede into a distance
in space ("afar") and in time ("formerly"), Maggie ﬁnds herself perched within a "castle-
tower" and thus in her house of ﬁction, as it were, high at the window of consciousness,
like a Jamesian watcher who watches the human scene not directly but by way of the
interpretive, creative imagination (156). And unlike Amerigo, who ﬁnds his own attempt
at the acquisition of moral vision to be as ﬁ'ustrating as his attempt at climbing up a
staircase of a quattrocento castle, Maggie ﬁnds that her own interpretive vision climbs
higher and higher. As Carolyn Porter argues, Maggie has become "a transcendent seer,"
and the power she exercises as "author in charge of the play" "rests on her perceived
status as a transcendent seer".17 Further, because she has become a transcendent seer,
Maggie looks out from her house of ﬁction and connects herself with her environment.
Thus her "outlook" expands "all" around to include not simply one garden but many
" gardens" and also "the woods," in a complete vision (537). As Susanne Kappeler argues,
"what distinguishes the interesting character ...is his or her awareness of perceiving, and
...[h]e will, with this consciousness, ﬁt his perceptions piece by piece into a larger scheme,
a coherent vision, and make something of them, make sense out of them. "18
Consequently, a little later in the novel, it seems to Maggie that she reads "the whole
history" of Charlotte's "relation" with Amerigo (552). The episodes between Charlotte and

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Amerigo then cohere into a wholeness for Maggie to form a complete story (with a
beginning and an end, that is, about the gowth and decline) of their "relation".

James emphasizes Maggie's acute ability to read and thus take possession of a
story by making the narrator‘s images blend with the center of consciousness's even in the
beginning of the second volume. When Maggie ﬁrst begins to ponder the remarkable
situation in which she ﬁnds that "[S]he had surrendered herself to her husband without the
shadow of a reserve or a condition and yet hadn't all the while given up her father by the
least little inch" it seems to her that she has, "with the mere touch of her hand" created a
change in their lives, a strange arrangement that has reared itself in "the very centre of the
garden of her life, like some wonderﬁrl beautiﬁrl but outlandish pagoda" (328,327).
Her image for her impression of the devotion she feels for her father and her husband is a
pagoda, that is, a strange and mysterious house of devotion, because it embodies the
strangeness of her own devotion that enables her "at once to separate and to keep
together" with the two men in her life (328). Her metaphOr also embodies her impression
of the strange devotion between her husband and her stepmother which is an eﬁ‘ect of her
(Maggie's) strange devotion for her husband. My point, however, is not to go into the
details of this metaphor but to focus on how James suggests the ﬁision of Maggie's
consciousness with the narrator's. Clearly this image is Maggie's, for as the narrator tells
us in connection with it, "that was what she felt, " or "to her considering mind," (327) or
she "caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing," or "as she liked to put it" (328). But
even in the nridst of all these phrases the narrator states, "as I have called it" (328). The
narrator, then, conceives Maggie's image as his own, and therefore blends her system of
representation with his own: "we may add, with the gound soon covered by her agitated
but resolute step..." (361). When James uses the ﬁrst-person plural in the ﬁrst volume it is
to let his readers understand that Amerigo depends on the narrator for the construction of
his image of the aromatic bath. But when he uses the ﬁrst-person plural in the second

volume he seems to suggest that the narrator is eager to establish an interdependent

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relation with Maggie. For James suggests that Maggie's image of the strange house of
devotion inﬂuences the narrator into creating the image of "a Mahometan mosque" that is
similar to Maggie's pagoda in that they (the pagoda and the mosque) are both eastern
houses of spiritual devotion and therefore strange and mysterious to the western mind
(328). And although the narrator creates only one more image - that of the spaniel - after
that of the mosque, he preambles his third image in this connection (that of Maggie as "the
ﬁightened but clinging young mother of an unlawful child") with "might I so far multiply
my metaphors" (330, my emphasis). The suggestion here is that the center of
consciousness's metaphor of the pagoda too has become part of the narrator's metaphors.
This connection or fusion between Maggie's and the narrator's images, and therefore an
inseparable connection between the narrator and Maggie that the narrator is keen on
making, depicts a clear picture of the way in which James emphasizes Maggie's (as
opposed to Amerigo's and also the narrator‘s) exertion of narrative authority.

Thus James, even in the beginning of the secOnd volume, shows Maggie as
exercising the narrative authority that enables her to compose a short story through her
image of the pagoda. For it paints a series of connected scenes. "She had walked round
and round" this strangely adorned construction that has reared itself in "the garden of her
life," that is, into her world of social and personal relations, and that has no doors through
which she "might have enter " (327). At ﬁrst she has not "wished" to enter, but now, as
she continues "to stare and wonder" at this strange situation constituting of her life as a
daughter and a wife and of its eﬂ‘ects that is represented as a pagoda in her imaginative
consciousness (327), she has "sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates"
that make up its exotic surface (3 28). This scene, then, is followed by another scene, one
that is suﬁ’used with climactic suspense: "Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at
her touch, alter a little, had come back to her from within; a sound suﬁciently suggesting
that her approach had been noted" (328). What makes this passage signiﬁcant to my

discussion is that even in the ﬁrst paragaph of the second volume, its center of

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consciousness demonstrates an ability to organize and connect, and thus even to condense
the sigiiﬁcant events of her life of the recent past into the coherence of a short story that
concludes with a climax of imminent change. Like Amerigo's images, Maggie's pagoda
image shows her desire to comprehend her situation by way of pictures that develop into
little scenes. But, unlike his images, hers has not developed from the narrator’s, and it also
looks forward to change.

Also, Maggie shows herself as a more forceﬁil storyteller than Amerigo in that,
even near the beginning of the second volume, she passes a narrative thread through his
image and her own to make them join into becoming parts of the same story. Thus she
develops her image of dancing, through which she compares the desuetude into which her
mental faculties have fallen with the desuetude into which her dancing steps have fallen:

It had come to the Princess, obscurely at ﬁrst, but little by little more
conceivably, that her faculties hadn't for a good while been concomitantly
used, the case resembled in a manner that of her once-loved dancing, a
matter of remembered steps that had gown vague ﬁom her ceasing to go
to balls. She would go to balls again - that seemed, ﬁ'eely, even cmdely,
stated, the remedy... (330)

This image, which is constructed by Maggie without help ﬁom the narrator ("It had come
to the Princess"), paints the scene of a nimble Maggie who has enjoyed a carefree
existence literally on dance ﬂoors in the past. It articulates the theme of how she conceives
her life of the past as following a coherent pattern, and of how in the present that pattern
has broken. Through a scene it tells the little story of a sprightly young Maggie who has
always taken an ordered, harmonious life for ganted. Her image also tells the story of the
social life that she has once enjoyed. Further, it continues this story in that it also paints
the scene of Maggie's early notions of having found conjugal harmony. And it makes this
miniature narrative longer by adding another scene to it through the picture of her being
suddenly swept out of the social sphere and out of the matrimonial harmony (which thus

stops even as it begins), and burdened by personal complications that have prevented her

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from enjoying that careﬁ'ee existence. These complications have crept up so surreptitiously
that she never realizes exactly when she ceases to dance in and out of the happy episodes
of her life and out of society. Maggie's image then reveals her comparison of her life of the
past with her life of the present. Also, it reveals her decision to analyze and plan. For this
image particularly tells the story of a consciousness that has turned an eye on the self and
found there the reluctance and disinclination to cogitate. But her image does something
that Amerigo's images do not. It shows the assiduous Maggie's determination to catch
hold of a "remedy," that is, to make a new design of harmony, and thus to change, to
gow, to act and not be acted upon. This image then also indicates the direction that the
protagonist's life is going to take. It creates the picture of Maggie as a dancer and suggests
the picture of Maggie as a choreogapher, that is, a maker of harmonious patterns. For if
she conceives herself as possessing "the constructive, the creative hand," the connection
between Maggie as a dancer and Maggie as a dance composer is not hard to make (425).
By extension her image looks forward to the performances she is going to put on as a
playmaker and a player, that is, as storyteller and protagonist. This dancing image is also
important because it picks up Amerigo's condescending image of his wife as "a little
dancing-grl at rest, ever so light of movement but most often panting gently, even a shade
compunctiously, on a bench" (266). Amerigo's image paints the scene of a "little
character" who, on ﬁnding herself on the social stage, is overwhelmed by it (266). And
Maggie's image reveals her vague and intuitive gasp of Amerigo's patronizing conception
of his "little" wife. If Maggie has begun to make coherent "picture[s]" "touch by touch"
which she forces upon Amerigo, and to organize the pictures into scenes and the scenes
into short stories, then she has also begun to intuit the pictures within Amerigo's mind and
connect them with those in her own mind (366). And if, as Teahan argues, "Maggie, in
eﬁect, becomes a J arnesian narrator who translates Amerigo's and Charlotte's
consciousness" as she "construct[s]" their consciousness,19 then she is also in effect a

Jamesian narrator in that she picks up the scene that Amerigo's image paints of Maggie as

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a panting "little dancing-girl" who has retired from the dance ﬂoor, and extends his scene
to make it a part of the story about her inactivity. She then runs her narrative thread
through Amerigo's image and her own and thus continues the story that he begins to read
about his "little" wife.20 '

And Maggie picks up this same narrative thread once again as she picks up the
story of the former dancer of the social stage who decides to return to it, and continues

this story through another image of herself as a dancer:

[A]nd when ...[Maggie] asked herself at Fawns to what single observation
of her own, of those oﬂ‘ered him in London, the Prince had had an
aﬂirmation to oppose, she but just failed to focus the small strained wife of

the moments in question as some panting dancer of a difﬁcult step who had
capered, before the footlights of an empty theatre, to a spectator lounging
in the box. (479)

This image of dancing, which again Maggie constructs without assistance from the
narrator ("when she asked herself"), continues the story of the timid little wife who earlier
forgets her dancing steps through desuetude but who now has taken her performances so
seriously that she even rehearses on the stage "before the footlights of an empty theatre".
And in this theater there is even a "spectator lounging in the box" who happens to be the
very person for whom she has decided to take up her ﬁgurative dancing once again, and
who has become suﬂiciently interested in his wife's performances to sit through her
rehearsals, or sumciently reassuring and encouraging to sit comfortably through them.
Whatever Amerigo sees in his "small strained wife" now who has shocked his
complaisance out of him with the "little story" (481) of the golden bowl that she tells him,
as Maggie herself realizes, he no longer conceives her merely as "some panting dancer".
For now not only has she taken up dancing again but has moved on ﬁ'om ball dances to "a
diﬂicult step". Thus whatever "observation of her own" that Amerigo resists as she tells
him her little story of the golden bowl, he certainly does not resist her performances,
which come after she tells him that story. At this point in the novel Maggie's perceptive

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imagination reads enough of Amerigo's indirect and non-verbal messages to begin to
comprehend some of the workings of his mind. Through this image Maggie shows her
understanding of Amerigo's transition from lounging inactivity to interested and
supportive spectatorship.

Maggie's ability as the teller of the " story" of the golden bowl initiates this change
in Amerigo (461). She has been collecting and preserving material about the dubious
element in Amerigo's relation with Charlotte which she learns to order and organize into
the coherence of a story by studying the causal relationships that connect the events of the
lives in the goup of four ever since the Matcharn party. And now she receives ﬁrrther
material from the antiquario as a result of her act of buying the golden bowl with a high
price without knowledge of the crack. The remarkably impressionable and impressive
antiquario, in addition to unburdening what appears to be his guilty conscience to Maggie,
also produces the scene that takes place in his shop long ago between Charlotte and
Amerigo as a result of his sight of their photogaphs which he observes as he waits for
Maggie in a room at Portland Place. The antiquario does not possess enough information
about the buyer or potential buyers of his golden bowl to be in complete possession of a
story. He possesses disconnected scenes, for example, a scene about his potential buyers,
which he offers to the actual buyer, and another about the actual buyer. He wants these
scenes to be orchestrated and connected, which is why he passes his information to
Maggie. Thus, although he cannot connect these scenes to form a little story about them,
he passes his information because he is aware of the potential in it for a story of geat
sigiiﬁcance to the actual buyer of the bowl. It is Maggie who takes hold of the scene and
makes it a coherent part among the other scenes she has read in her observations of
Amerigo and Charlotte, who draw her apprehensive attention because of their "vigilance
of 'care'," which strikes her as their extreme precautions against "working harm"
(268,369). Indeed she makes this scene that Charlotte and Amerigo enact in the little

Bloomsbury shop the turning point of the story she now reads and tells about the golden

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bowl. The story she now tells Amerigo has such force for him that in all honesty he tells
her she has become perhaps "more sacred" to him now than she has been even on the day
of their marriage (462). For Maggie amazes Amerigo with the way she coherently and
consistently develops her thoughts. She speaks with such coherence about the golden
bowl that her speech becomes a "story". The "moral exchange" that occurs between them
is the result of the story she begins to tell him and that reveals her "superior lucidity"
(455). For it suggests unuttered words that Amerigo "might have inserted between the
lines of her already spoken" (45 5). Consequently he follows "the clear train of her speech"
so thoroughly that he gives the storyteller all his "attention" (457). Thus the storyteller in
Maggie makes relations among events and talks about "relations" between Amerigo and
Charlotte, and consequently, draws her husband into relation with herself (456).21 If it
seems that Amerigo "absolutely liked her to talk," then clearly he ﬁnds her narrative
authority fascinatingly forceful (45 7). Thus he becomes the captivated listener, the
spellbound audience member whom she has "straitened and tied" with her narrative thread
(457). She has captivated him in this manner particularly because she is the accomplished
storyteller who understands the value of "economy," and who understands when to throw
in an element of "supreme cleamess" and when to open up a chasm of uncertainty (463).
Thus she is the storyteller who understands how to control "all the possibilities" in a story
(488). Maggie does not know what her father knows or whether he suspects anything at
all, but she understands what use to make of her own absence of knowledge in the story
she tells. Thus she does not mention her father at all. It is the quality of suggestiveness in
Maggie's story that entrances Amerigo most particularly. Maggie is the serious storyteller
who makes her "straight little story" spellbinding because of the interpretive activity she
imposes upon her listener (481): "Find out for yourselﬂ" she tells Amerigo at the end of
her little story (465). For Amerigo to ﬁnd out for himself, instead of relying on Maggie's
or Charlotte's interpretive vision, is ultimately to change ﬁom an inactive, leisurely and

dilettantish perceiver to an earnest seeker, and thus an active perceiver.

137

Thus Maggie winds her narrative thread around Amerigo to situate him in his
"labyrinth," so as to bind him to the act of ﬁnding, but she also unwinds it to lead him out
of his "labyrinth," and thus to lead him to the act of seeing:

Hadn't she fairly got into his labyrinth with him? - wasn't she indeed in the
very act of placing herself there for him at its centre and core, whence, on
that deﬁnite orientation and by an instinct all her own, she might securely
guide him out of it? She offered him thus assuredly a kind of support that
wasn't to have been imagined in advance (454)

Maggie begins telling Amerigo her story by showing him the broken golden bowl and
letting him know that she had placed the cracked but nevertheless intact bowl in "full
view" exclusively for him to "see" it (454). Thus she passes her narrative thread to connect
the broken bowl with the intact bowl, to indicate her own movement ﬁ'om igrorance to
perception, and to move from a suggestion of her ability to mystify him to her desire to
help him "see". She has placed Amerigo in a "labyrinth" with the thread of words with
which she makes her little story and which leaves her interested but intrigued listener with
much interpreting to do. She then evokes questions in her listener but gives him no
answers. Thus with her story Maggie binds Amerigo to the act of ﬁnding out or creating
the answers to his questions, that is, to making his own interpretations with his own
imaginative consciousness. But as a result, he has also received a glimpse of a perceptive
and contemplative Maggie who has already begun to work out a solution to the problem
in their marriage. Thus, if to bind Amerigo is to thrust him into a perceptual quest, then
Maggie paradoxically gives him the clue and enables him to be free to begin his journey,
that is, to ﬁnally move forward instead of stagnating on Mr. Verver’s boat. Thus she has
also "fairly got into his labyrinth" in order to unwind the narrative thread and show him the
way out of his labyrinth. She parallels herself with the mythological Ariadne, for she has
been deceived by the man she loves, and as a consequence has even felt herself alone on a
"strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried" (353). For John Carlos Rowe,

however, Maggie "hardly [plays] the role of Ariadne": The Maggie who places herself at

 

138

the center of the labyrinth is the only one whom Amerigo is forced to see "in his long and
winding labyrinth" with the departure of Adam and Charlotte; and thus Maggie's "art
transforms her into the nrinotaur - the destructive element itself. "22 But I would argue
that it is not so much that Maggie is not an Ariadne as that she is a different and perhaps
more complicated Ariadne than the old or mythological Ariadne. For she refuses to be a
duped and victimized Ariadne who parts with her thread: She keeps a ﬁrm gasp over her
narrative thread and therefore enters the labyrinth with the man she loves and helps, and
even creates that labyrinth and places him in it. She then, in a manner, conﬂates the ﬁgure
of Ariadne with the ﬁgures of Daedalus and Minos. Consequently, she is a new "Ariadne"
who sees herselfin the other and the other in herself; and as such, changes the old story of
Ariadne (537).

Thus Maggie exercises her narrative authority through her ability to change an old
story into a new one. Bersani argues that "[r]eality in The Golden Bowl consists in the
novelistic arrangements of the ﬁrst half; the second half gives us the correction, the
unashamed, radical revision which Maggie then makes of her own work".23 I would
suggest that Maggie revises by changing old little stories into new little stories. This is
why she renrinds herself of "an actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but
who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines
not in the text" (348). For Laurence Holland, Maggie's ability to improvise is expressive of
her realization that she has been "too passively" accepting the "‘ﬁinny form'" of the lives of
the goup of four, and consequently, it is expressive of the beginning of her active sharing
in their lives.24 Maggie's ability to improvise also shows that after she has "rehears[ed]"
her part and possessed herself of the old story, and after she has begun to perform as an
actor in that story, she ﬁnds that the old story has changed and that she has to
accommodate herself to the change. Thus she is an actor who is an author because she
constantly studies her relation with her environment and takes part in the making of the

change. She "'registers' the 're-perusal' of her wor " as Bersani argues,25 but she also

139

moves on to register the changes that others have brought. Thus her observation of
Amerigo's changed attitude towards Charlotte helps her to carry on her "show," that is,
her ﬁction (475). Maggie studies the "repetition[s]" that occur in her actual world and
comes to the conclusion that "a repetition" is not an exact duplication (539). For instance,
when the roles are reversed between Maggie herself and Charlotte, and she sees herself as
the pursuer and Charlotte as the pursued, she analyzes "the diﬁ‘erence in intention" that
brings the new element in the old story (539). Just as she takes note of the changes that
occur around her which bring new elements into the old story of her life, so she herself
changes the old story of her life by bringing new elements into it. Like Bersani, Kaston,
too, argues that Maggie's revisions are like James's. Thus she writes, "in the second
volume Maggie redesigns the plot of the ﬁrst in an act of authorial revision similar to the
ones James performed on his own works for the New York Edition": Through the act of
looking again Maggie's vision enables her to change "old forms or ﬁctions to become
new," and to personalize and honor the "inherited forms" that she preserves.26 I would go
ﬁirther and say that Maggie's revisions are not only with regard to the second volume. Her
ability to revise is already in a vague and embryonic form even in the ﬁrst volume. Thus
she changes "an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a
new link between a wife and a husband, [for] Maggie and her father had, with every
ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a gandpapa"
(151). It is Amerigo who, as the central intelligence of the ﬁrst volume, reﬂects on this
change. But his reﬂection is geared to the irony of the increasing gap between himself and
his wife, and he reserves this observation as a comment on the problem Maggie creates in
their marriage. But James, at the same time, does something in addition: he reserves
Amerigo's amused condescension as a comment on the latter's failure to realize the portent
of this change of an "old story" into a new one. Maggie's ability to comprehend differences

(for example, the diﬁ‘erence between the past and the present) and changes enables her to

140

gow, and consequently to transform an old story into a new one. Thus her revisions are
not with regard to her "ﬁctions" alone.

For Maggie's purpose is to change the old equilibrium of the story of her life into a
new one. It is to work for this new equilibrium that Maggie- tries to make new
arrangements, that is, new pairings, among the goup of four. For example, early in
volume two she proposes the pairing of Adam and Amerigo, and of herself and Charlotte.
Further, she accomplishes the pairing of Amerigo and herself and of Adam and Charlotte.
And as a result of this new pairing, Amerigo is no longer the displaced father and her son
"a hapless half-orphan" (151). Thus we see the picture of a father and son relationship as
the Prince and principino come up together with the departure of Mr. and Mrs. Verver, a
picture in which we see the child "clutching" his father‘s band (578), followed by the
picture of Maggie's and Amerigo's embrace in the concluding scene. Amerigo, then, ﬁnds
a new relation with his son and his wife as the novel's concluding scenes suggest.

And as the novel's concluding paragaph points out, Amerigo ﬁnally is able to
"see" for himself without having to follow the sight or vision oﬂ‘ered by someone else (for

example, either Fanny, or Charlotte, or even Maggie) who works as a guide:

It kept him before her therefore, taking in - or trying to - what she
so wonderfully gave. He tried, too clearly, to please her - to meet her in her
own way, but with the result only that, close to her, her face kept before
him, his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her, he
presently echoed: "'See'? I see nothing but you." And the truth of it had
with this force after a moment so strangely lighted his eyes that as for pity
and dread of them she buried her own in his breast. (580)

For Ralf Norrman these concluding lines of The Golden Bowl show how this novel has
moved ﬁ'om the characters' use of pronominal referential ambiguity (that sigiiﬁes
insecurity) to Amerigo's use of the speciﬁc second person singular: "Amerigo cares for no

other 'she'. He embraces his wife and uses the only pronoun he needs now".27 I would add

that Amerigo's conﬁdent and speciﬁc claim shows how his newly developing intimacy has

141

engossed him so thoroughly that he is no longer ﬁ'ustrated by what he does not
understand about Maggie. He does not "see" what ...[Maggie] so wonderﬁrlly gave" but
what he himself wishes to see. For Jean-Christophe Agnew, this scene depicts "a
chastened Prince" who is once again "Maggie's dazzling and dazzled possession, and as
such, fails to catch her meaning."28 And for Porter, the Prince is still an "impotent
observer" whose "personal single self" is absent and whose vision has "narrowed itself
considerably" in the concluding scene.29 But as James points out, Amerigo now sees in
his own personal, individual way. He tries "too clearly, to please her - to meet her in her
own way, " but he cannot meet her in "her own way" and has to meet her in his own
diﬂ‘erent way. But because he "see[s]" in his own way, he ﬁnally does "see" her, and
consequently, begins to comprehend something of one of those American minds that have
so mystiﬁed him in the beginning of this novel. For Cameron, "if Amerigo sees nothing but
her," he sees nothing but "what she has made him see, " and consequently "she has nothing
at all. "30 And for Jonathan Freedman, Amerigo's claim of seeing nothing but Maggie
signiﬁes that Maggie is the stern judge whose power is punitive and who releases her
transgessing husband from imprisonment only "on promise of good behavior".31 But as I
see Amerigo's claim, his vision indicates how his interpretive faculty has developed as a
result of Maggie's refusal to let him see through her eyes. She has told Amerigo the story
of the golden bowl, which includes the "story" he reads in it and the scene he enacts in the
little antique shop, and which requires him to develop his own interpretive faculty. And as
a result of what he sees, Amerigo has ﬁnally moved from inactive spectatorship to
wholesome action: it is his "whole act" that "enclos[es]" Maggie.

What the conclusion suggests, then, is that a new state of equilibrium seems to
have been established because the husband and wife meet each other on a new basis. For
what the conclusion highlights is not a lop-sided relation, in which one borrows another's
vision, but a balance between two diﬁ‘erent points of view which are implicit in Maggie's

and Amerigo's own different visions or "way[s]". They are each aware of the other's

142

different point of view, and through this mutual awareness James, in these concluding
lines, shows how his protagonists ﬁnally do not supersede but parallel one another as
centers of consciousness. Thus, if, as Teahan argues, Amerigo collapses as reﬂective
center, and undergoes "an extinction of sorts" at the end of the ﬁrst volume,32 then at the
end of the second volume he emerges once more with the capacity to establish his own
point of view and not succumb to borrowing Maggie's. When Amerigo "echoe[s]"
Maggie, James points out that, like Maggie, Amerigo sees. There is then harmony in the
ability to see, for the force of his ability to see balances the force of her ability to see.
Therefore the echo is not an echo in the subject of perception but in the equal ability to
engage in perceptions. What Maggie and Amerigo have ﬁnally achieved is a relation that is
balanced by what they comprehend about each other on one side with what they do not on
the other side. For each of them vision is balanced by blindness: if the Prince sees nothing
but Maggie, and therefore is in a manner blind, then so too is Maggie, who shuts and
buries her eyes in Amerigo's breast as though she has been blinded by the strange light in
his eyes. And as their passionate embrace itself suggests, such blindness acts as the
stimulant required by them to continue to work at their newfound intimacy. If the strange
light in Amerigo's eyes, or the "pity and dread" in Maggie's own, strikes us as a rather
disquieting expression of a new equipoise based on emotional intensity, then we must
remember that in all her humility, to quote Holland, Maggie "shields her eyes from the
impact of ...[Amerigo's] faith and vision."33 As Mark Reynolds observes, Amerigo's
concluding words signify his "wonder at the as yet vague possibilities of what their
romance might be."34 The sense of vague possibilities ﬁnds expression not simply in his
words but through his eyes and also through Maggie's. For Bersani, Maggie "saves an
order which seems to be totally irrelevant to her passion. "35 And for Rowe, "[t]he
marriages have been preserved by emptying them of all possible meaning."36 But as James
points out, Maggie does not simply save forms when she saves her marriage or empty

them of "possible meaning". What the new equipoise between Amerigo and Maggie

143

reveals, as the strange light in his eyes, and the mixture of "pity and dread" in hers imply,
is a relation that is based not on sameness and therefore consolatory uniformity and
certainty, but on diﬂ'erence and therefore the challenge of unpredictability and uncertainty.
It is a difference that will lead them to wholeness together, and it is an unpredictability and
uncertainty that will prevent their relation ﬁ'om becoming stagnant or superﬁcial. James
implies such a sharp sense of unpredictability in the new possibilities of the newly
developing intimacy that even the narrator does not quite understand Maggie's act of
burying her eyes. Thus he writes "as for pity and dread" and not "for pity and dread" (my
emphasis). The new story that Maggie sets in motion is so full of uncertainty that the
possibilities in it go beyond the narrator‘s perceptual control, which makes the conclusion
a necessity at this point. According to David Craig, "having shaped her story to end in
marital bliss, Maggie discovers that she cannot know the ending that she has imagined":
"Maggie discovers the limits of the imagination, the loss of possibilities of an end."3 7 But
as I see the conclusion, it reveals not her "loss of possibilities of an end" but her nervous
apprehension of her continued exertions in her efforts to create relations. Thus it reveals
Maggie's apprehensive opening up to the uncertain new material for more new little
stories, and to the uncertainties and instabilities of life that change old stories into new
ones.

Also according to Craig, "[t]he ending to The Golden Bowl presents James with
special problems because he has displaced himself in the compositional process with his
internal authors."37 But clearly it is not so much that James displaces himself as that he
shows his art of storytelling through his "internal authors." Thus when James gets down

38 it is not to devalue

into the " arena" and shares his narrative authority with his reﬂectors,
or suspend his authority or to incarnate himself as a character, as Irena Auerbuch Smith
reads him,39 but to hold up the "clean glass" to the act of storytelling itself, and not to
hold up "the muﬂled majesty of authorship" (AN 328). Indeed, James's opposition to the

"mere muﬂled majesty of irresponsible authorship" is expressive of his aim to clearly

144

depict his art of storytelling (AN 328, my emphasis). For it is to the art of composing
narratives he alludes when he asserts that "as the whole conduct of life consists of things
done which do other things in their turn, just so our behaviour and its ﬁuits are essentially
one and continuous" (AN 347). To make such connections of actions, or to connect one's
actions to create coherence and continuity, is to exert narrative authority. And, as James
suggests, this is what his centers of consciousness do as they act - being "actor[s] in the
offered play" - and register or reﬂect the "whole thing," that is, the "thing" that is made
whole by virtue of forged connections (AN 329). If, as James continues to write in the
preface, it is imperative for "the artist" "[n]ot to be disconnected, but to feel the
whole chain of relation and responsibility," then that artist is above all a storyteller (AN
348)

145

Notes

1. Henry James, W (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1984), 328. Cited parenthetically as AN.

2. Henry James, Iheﬁnldeanml (1904; London: Penguin Books, 1985) 123.

3. Sheila Teahan, "IheGnldeanhd and the Shattered Vessel of Consciousness,"
WW (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State
University Press, 1995) 133. Teahan's main argument in this essay is that the image of the
bowl ﬁgures the vessel of consciousness and also signiﬁes the doubly ﬁguring and
disﬁguring capacity of metaphor itself because it (the bowl) "ﬁgures both the gound of
narrative and its antithesis, both the decorative surface of James's standpoint and the abyss
behind or benea " (134).

4. Daniel Mark Fogel, WWW
(Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) 97. Fogel's main
argument is that Ihe_GnldenB_Qillll is "an intricate but faithﬁil enactment of the Romantic
dialectic of spiral return" (95).

5. Paul Armstrong, IhLPhenomenolmoLI-Ienmlames (Chapel Hill and
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) 145. Armstrong argues that through
Iheﬁnldanrml, James depicts the gap between the Self and the Other as unbridgeable.
According to Armstrong, the Prince is aware of the discrepancy between the Ververs' Self
for Others and their Self for Themselves, and that Maggie fails to see Amerigo's
subjectivity and therefore does not see that "only a relation of mutual recogiition and
reciprocal exchange" would enable each to be "in ﬁeedom" with the other (146).

6. The quotation of W is from W
W Volume II (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1946) 852.

7. Beth Sharon Ash, "Narcissism and the Gilded Image: A Psychoanalytical

Reading ofIhrﬁnldeanwl," IheHennLIamesReyis-rw 15.1 (1994): 73. In this article,

 

146
Ash argues that Maggie's bond with her father shapes her subjectivity and is expressive of
"oedipal and preoedipal narcissistic wishes" (55).

8. Leo Bersani, 'The Jamesian Lie," W
W (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 148. For Bersani,
Amerigo's and Charlotte's "past is a concession on James's part to an order of
psychological probability which the novel in fact dismisses, what is important is that they

make love as a result of the arrangements contrived during the time of the novel itself"

(148).

9. Margery Sabin, "Competition of Intelligence in W" 111:
on. r (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987) 77. Sabin argues that in the ﬁrst volume James oﬁ‘ers,

 

through Charlotte, "a compelling image of intelligence richly in accord with normative
English values" and a "dramatic openness" (68), while in the second volume, he oﬂ‘ers,
through Maggie, a rejection of normative values and a "Suppression of expressive speech"
(82).

10. Carren Kaston W (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984) 153. Kaston argues that this
scene "invites us to view the novel as an aggegate of competing authorial acts by the
various characters" (153), and that Amerigo, Charlotte, and Fanny, fail as authors because
they "have assumed authorial powers without consenting to be accountable," as opposed
to Maggie, who succeeds because she has willingly paid "for the direction in which her
desigr pushes the plot" (158). On a different note, Priscilla Walton, in "A Mistress of
Shades: Maggie as Reviser in W" in W 13.2
(1992), reads in this scene Maggie's ﬁgurative restoration of the order of patriarchy"
(151). But clearly it is Charlotte who attempts and fails to restore the old order - an order
which subscribes to a decadent patriarchal society in which even an intelligent, sensitive,

and proud woman feels self-gatiﬁed in her role as another woman's husband's nristress.

147

Maggie, on the other hand, works to break the old order of a female's role to please her
father and her husband by eﬁ‘acing the self within her. Now she works to please the self
within her by creating a connection with her husband. Thus she does not so much restore
an order here as she creates one.

11. Sabin, 103.

12. Sharon Cameron, "Thinking Speaking: Iheﬁnldenﬁtml and the Production
of Meaning," in ThinkinanﬂentLIamra (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1989) 104. Cameron argues that Thefmldenﬁtmd is primarily concerned about
meaning and not knowledge, and "meaning is subject to manipulation" (109). For
Cameron, the ﬁrst volume demonstrates that "speech is the medium through which one
character exerts improper authority over another's understanding," while the second
volume demonstrates that "thoughts become the medium in which meaning is make
audible" (96).

13. Meili Steele, "The Drama of Reference in James's WW1.” Nnxel;
W 21.1 (1987) 85. In this article, Steele examines the role of reference in
"dialogue, and the presentation of the individual's experience" (73), and argues that
"obscure dialogues" in Ihe_Gnlden_Bmill "are an exploration of the ontological
discontinuity generated by speakers with diﬂ‘erent referential languages" (79).

14. Bersani, 133. Bersani argues that the object of perception is the activity of the
seer (138).

15. Nicola Bradbury, WW (Oxford: Clarendon press,
1979)]72,195.

16. Mark Seltzer, WWW (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1984) 62,71. And John Alberti, in "The Economics of Love: The Production of

Value in IhLGQldenBle," in IheHennLlameLReyim 12.1 (1991) discusses the

entanglement between love and money by focussing on "economic metaphors" (10).

148

17. Carolyn Porter, "Henry James: Visionary Being," W
at a (Middleton:

 

Wesleyan University Press, 1981) 161, 162.

18. Susanne Kappeler, W (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980) 165.

19. Teahan, 137 .
20. The resting dancer image is not the only picture that Maggie's consciousness

picks up ﬁ'om Amerigo's. It seems to Maggie that she reads a tragically romantic story or
follows such a story as she watches Charlotte's and Amerigo's movements in the second
volume. For Maggie, watching them is like watching the performance of a "pair of
operatic, of high Wagnerian lovers interlocked in their wood of enchantrnent, a geen
glade as romantic as one's dream of an old German forest" (519). Obviously, the scenes
that Maggie contemplates are an extension of the scene that Amerigo depicts in his image
of Charlotte and himself in the "sun-chequered geenwood of romance" (283). Also,
Maggie's pictures of Amerigo's "privation that had left on his lips perhaps a little of the
same thirst with which she fairly felt her own distorted," or of the "torment of the lost
pilgrim who listens in desert sands for the possible, the impossible plash of water"(519),
are reminiscent of Amerigo's pictures of his "thirsty lips" and of "the promised well in the
desert" (283). It is as though Maggie picks up Amerigo's images, which he never
articulates, and extends them to read the scenes that follow those that he portrays. She
then repeatedly acts in the capacity of the narrator, and thus continues and completes the
stories that Amerigo begins. And if his vision stops at a romance, her vision goes on to
read the tragedy after the romance.

21. On a contrary note, Marica Ian, in "Consecrated Diplomacy and the
Concretion of Self," in W 7.1 (1985) argues that Maggie moves

"from "sociability to solipcisnr, ﬁom relation to possession" (31).

149

22. John Carlos Rowe, 'The Deceptive Symmetry of Art in W"
Henri/.Adamundﬂenndames (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976) 219. As I see the
scene to which Rowe refers, after the departure of her father and Charlotte, Maggie, like
the Ariadne deserted by her unfaithﬁil lover, Theseus, is suddenly ﬁlled with the "terror"
of uncertainty and disillusion: "Here it was then, the moment, the golden ﬁuit that had
shone from afar; only what were these things in the fact, for the hand and for the lips,
when tested, when tasted - what were they as a reward?" (579). But into this moment of
terror, anxiety, and disillusion, enters Amerigo, the eﬁ‘ect of whose presence for Maggie is
"the assurance of her safety making her terror drop, and making for the erasure of all
sense of the unfaithﬁrl Amerigo (579). Amerigo's clasp of Maggie in a passionate embrace,
in the ﬁnal scene, is vaguely suggestive of Dionysus's clasp of Ariadne. Thus I see the
conﬂation of a Theseus and a Dionysus in Amerigo who moves ﬁ'om being Maggie's
adulterous husband to Charlotte's faithless lover, and ﬁnally to Maggie's faithful husband.

23. Bersani, 147. ‘

24. Laurence Bedwell Holland, IhLExncnsemeﬁsionaEssaanheCmﬁm
Heanlames (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964,1982) 381. Holland
argues that the "gace of Maggie's histrionic performance and the actions she helps other
perform become the foundation of the entire novel" (3 80): By forging "the lies, illusions,
and devious pretences," Maggie helps to "redeem the promise of their lives" (3 87).

25. Bersani, 147.

26. Kaston, 137,166.

27 . Ralf Norrman, "Referential Ambiguity in Pronouns," W
HenQLlames'LEictions (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Limited, 1982)
65. Norrman argues that Iheﬁnldenﬂom depicts pronominal referential ambiguity in a
game of combinations of pairings, and that referential ambiguity dramatizes these

combinations and thereby creates intensity (15).

150

28. Jean-Christophe Agnew, "The Consuming Vision of Henry James," Ihe
WWW ed. Richard
Wightman and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983) 100. Agnew
argues that James depicts "a reiﬁed world," the product of modem consumer culture, that
is "constructed by and for a consuming vision" (98).

29. Porter, 147. Porter argues that at the novel's end the Prince, as the "art object
boarded by the Ververs," is at last brought into "the stream of circulation," for he now
sees his "use-value" for Maggie, who has exchanged her father for him. Thus, for Porter,
Maggie becomes the "capitalist" who redeems the Prince's commodity value in the
commodiﬁed world from which her power comes (148). According to Porter, when
Maggie pays for the Prince by giving up her father, the latter can "at least assess his own
worth to her - although he is able to assess little else" (148). But as I see it, in assessing
his own worth to her, the Prince also ﬁnds out his own individual diﬂ‘erence, and thus his
personal, single self. And thus when he embraces her his "whole act" encloses her.
Compressed within this phrase is the suggestion of Amerigo's having risen above self-
division and found wholeness through action.

30. Cameron, 112.

31- Jonathan Freedman, W
W (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990) 233.
Freedman's argument about IhLﬁQldenBle is that when Maggie begins to act she "is
transformed into a literal Belle Dame Sans Merci", whose power derives from a
"combination of cruelty and boundless knowledge" (234). For Freedman, James does not
simply inﬂate "the power of the decadent dark lady" but also domesticates it in Maggie:
She is not the typical femme fatale, in that she works to establish "marital unity and
familial harmony" (239). Thus for Freedman, 111mm shows how James moves
beyond "the terms bequeathed him by the tradition of British aestheticism" as a result of
his "aesthetic morality" (242).

151

32. Teahan, 136.
33. Holland, 407.

34. Mark Reynolds, "Counting the Costs: The Inﬁrmity of Art and Men
Email," WM 6.1 (1984) 22. Reynolds particularly discusses the
differences between Maggie's and Charlotte's art: While Maggie's ﬁction grants freedom to
Charlotte by allowing her "a capacity for imagination and action," Charlotte's art attempts
"to deny Maggie her. freedom" (22).

3S. Bersani, 153.

36. Rowe, 223. Rowe's main argument in this essay is that "[a]t the same time the
golden bowl promises a perfect form" and "reveal[s] the impossibility of ﬁrlﬁlling" such a
hope "in a world of time and change" (203).

37. David M. Craig, "The lndeterminacy of the End: Maggie Verver and the
Limits of Imagination," Wm 3.2 (1982) 136,135. According to
Craig, at the novel's conclusion, Maggie has "entered a world that is not her own" (133).

38. For a reading of "the contagious emanation of creativity" in this passage of
James's preface see Daniel T. O'Hara's "Henry James's Version of Judgment," in Boundary
2 23.1 (1996): James maintains "a democratically aesthetic sovereignty" by which "the
creative power of imaginative innovation contagiously disseminates itself among
characters and readers so that they too become authorial" (68).

39. Irena Auerbuch Smith, "The Golden Goal: Toward a Dialogic Imagination in
henry James's Last Completed Novel," W 16.2 (1995) 173. Smith's
argument is that James engages "in both a monologue about and a dialogue with his

characters" in IhLQQldemHl. and thus engages himself "as author and antiquario"
(173).

Chapter 4

THE CHANGING MAGINATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS OF LAMBERT
STRETHER

In the Preface to The Ambassadors, when James writes of his decision to employ
"but one centre [of consciousness] " and therefore to keep "it all within my hero's
compass," it is because "The thing was to be so much this worthy's intimate adventure"
that the author aims to "leave" as little as possible "a part of its value for [the protagonist],
and a fortiori for ourselves, unexpressed" (AN 317).1 Thus, although James does not
make Lambert Strether a narrator, he endows him with a narrational role. By making one
"centre" alone and by keeping it "all" within that center's "compass," James suggests that
he places the narrative itself in Strether's grasp. The verb "compass" connotes a successful
reach, and the noun "compass" is suggestive of a circle with its center from which point
the circumference is encompassed and grasped. And Strether himself seems to be at the
center. Thus, in effect, James illustrates how he invests his protagonist with narrative
authority. As a consequence, the author seems to associate the protagonist with the
narrator to a certain extent, but he also allows the former's evolving imaginative
consciousness to surpass the latter's. Thus in a sense, James allows the reﬂector to surpass
the narrator in narrational abilities. The growth in Strether's imagination enables him to
understand the principle of continual change within his environment, and thus to read and
tell the stories of that environment, although he does not literally become a storyteller.
Also, it enables him to understand the principle of continual change within his own
consciousness. As a result he realizes that there is nothing ﬁnal and stable within himself.
Thus the grth in Strether's imaginative consciousness enables him to ﬁnd the story of

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his life, which is the story of continual change. Consequently, it enables him to exert
narrative authority, and thus to authorize his own point of view. And the exertion of
narrative authority leads Strether to ﬁnd his relation with his surroundings. Also, as the
exercise of narrative authority enables him to make narrative connections in his
interpretation of events, so it enables him to make connections between his own past,
present, and ﬁrture.

It is Strether's imagination that helps him to ﬁnd his way when he becomes
immersed in conﬁrsion. An example of this can be found in his image of metaphorical

immersion in water early in the novel:

[T]here were days when Strether seemed to bump against [Waymarsh] as a

sinking swimmer might brush a submarine object. The fathomless medium

held them - Chad's manner was the fathomless medium; and our ﬁiend felt

as if they passed each other, in their deep immersion, with the round

impersonal eye of silent ﬁsh.2
Conﬁonted by Chad's unexpected transformation, Strether‘s ﬁrst reaction is to feel as
helpless as though he were drowning out of exhaustion like a "sinking swimmer". He has
tried to comprehend this transformation with his rational faculty, but the attempt to think
"logically" has drowned him uncontrollably in a sea of "bewilder[ment]" (170,173).
Despite Strether's logical thinking, Chad has become ungraspable by virtue of his
transformation in a city that itself strikes Strether as continually changing, and therefore as
continually trembling and melting out of his grasp. As Maud Ellmann asserts, "[t]he world
twinkles with alterity".3 At this point Strether is completely ﬂabbergasted by the strange
and unexpected phenomenon of Chad's change. But, once immersed in this unfathomably
conﬁrsing element, although still ﬂabbergasted, he ﬁnds himself transformed ﬁ'om a
helpless "sinking swimmer" into a vigorous "ﬁsh". For, once immersed in it, Strether turns
to his imagination to pull him through. James shows the process of development that
Strether's imagination undergoes even through these two images. It seems safe to assume

that the image of the sinking swimmer is both the narrator's and Strether's, for the

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sentence does not state exactly whose image this is: "Strether seemed to bump against him
[Waymarsh] as a sinking swimmer ..." Thus it shows how in the early phase of Strether’s
observation of Chad (and for that matter, of Waymarsh as well), James associates Strether
with the narrator in regards to the protagonist's imaginative consciousness, and
consequently, to his narrational abilities. But even in the same passage James points out
that the reﬂector is also capable of creating his own image. Thus James points out that he
does not share the creation of the image of the "silent ﬁsh" with the narrator. This
particular image is Strether's own: "and our ﬁiend felt as if they passed each other with
the round impersonal eye of silent ﬁsh" (my emphasis). It seem as though Strether's
imaginative consciousness continues to develop, resulting in the leap ﬁ'om a "sinking
swimmer" to a "silent ﬁsh". Strether is "silent" because, at this early stage, words to
explain the young man's transformation melt out of his grasp into silence like water. And
he is vaguely and instinctively beginning to be aware that in this fathomless element which
is like water itself, nothing is certain or stable or uniform.4 Consequently, Strether does
not conceive himself as in any way exerting narrative authority: "[E]ach of his remarks [in
his discussions about Chad's situation with Miss Gostrey], as it came, seemed to drop into
a deeper well" (189). For each of his utterances makes him increasingly aware of how
fathomlessly unclear things are, and takes him to a deeper level of contemplation. As a
result he begins to be aware of his own meaning-making activitiess Chad's
unfathomability, then, helps Strether to develop "the round impersonal eye" of acute
observation, and thus to begin exerting narrative authority. His imagination makes an
intuitive note of how everything glides out of his grasp and continues to change shape like
water. For, as the imaginative faculty ﬁnds expression in ﬁction, it creates nothing ﬁnal or
absolute but everything that is dependent on interpretation. Therefore with his "deep
immersion" Strether instinctively makes himself at home in the new, ungraspable and
changeable, unpredictable and unstable environment that he ﬁnds in Paris. Thus, unlike the

unimaginative Waymarsh whose contact with Chad's fathomless element reduces him

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merely into an unconscious "submarine object," Strether, with eyes wide open, learns to
speculate and to discover by making imaginative guesses.

But, as Strether's image of deep immersion also reveals, at this point his
imaginative thinking shows a certain analytical incoherence and inconsistency. As James
points out, although there is coherence and consistency in his image of his transformation
ﬁom a live but "sinking swimmer" into a live but "silent ﬁsh," there is questionable
coherence andconsistency in the image of the transformation of Waymarsh from a sunken
and inanimate "submarine object" into a silent ﬁsh. (How, one wonders, especially after
one has ﬁnished reading the novel and come back to this passage, has Waymarsh been
subjected to the kind of transformation that Strether has?) At this point Strether's images
do not consistently show signs of sophistication. Thus he conceives of Jeanne de Vronnet
as "a faint pastel in an oval frame: he thought of her already as of some lurking image in a
long gallery, the portrait of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but that
she had died young" (247). If Strether‘s image for Jeanne as a portrait of an unknown dead
princess shows his profound sensitivity to her mysterious young heart that has suppressed
its own yearnings, and thus has died a ﬁgurative death, that is, if his image demonstrates
his ability to catch an impression and make a picture out of a glimpse, (an ability that
James lands in "The Art of Fiction"), it also shows how this picture is "faint" and not vivid
or striking, and how he objectiﬁes the girl herself in the process. Without the use of his
imaginative faculty, which seems to ﬁnd fair ground for nourishment in the values of Paris,
Strether's rational faculty, which conversely seems to have found a stimulating ground in
the values of Woollett,6 drowns his consciousness in the exhaustion of unrewarding
activity. But now, with the use of his imagination, his rational faculty shows that, although
it has not reached a high point, it has made a beginning. Thus, if Strether's imaginative
faculty begins to move forward so forcibly that the narrator at times has to make use of
the former's image rather than coining his own in parts where he is not quoting characters'

speeches, early in the novel it also becomes indistinguishable from the narrator's

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imaginative faculty. For instance, in the image for Strether's temporary respite at Notre
Dame ﬁ'om his problem of confounding his ambassadorial mission of representing Mrs.
Newsome, it is not at all clear how much of the construction depends on Strether and how
much on the narrator: "he was able to drop his problem at the door [of the church] very
much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on the threshold, in the
receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar" (272). Although, as Sheila Teahan observes, this
rhetorical indistinguishability is inevitable in "indirect discourse,"7 it also seems that
because James sometimes even at this early stage in the novel gives Strether the power to
create forceful images, he makes use of the rhetorical indistinguishability to suggest that
the reﬂector potentially shows the narrator's imaginative abilities even in the beginning.

In tracing the gradual growth of sophistication in his protagonist's imagination,
however, James points out that at the beginning of the novel Strether is obviously
dependent on the narrator’s imagination. Thus at this point it is the narrator who supplies
an image for Strether's vaguely forming thoughts regarding his inclination and hesitancy in
beﬁiending the urbane and assertive Maria Gostrey who surprises him into an unlooked-
for amnity. As the dazed protagonist does not see the parallel and contrast between her
and himself, James points out that the reader has to depend on the narrator:

She aﬁ‘ected him as almost insolently young; but ...was however, like
himself; marked and wan; only it naturally couldn’t have been known to him
how much a spectator looking ﬁ'om one to the other might have discerned
that they had in common. It wouldn't for such a spectator have been
altogether insupposable that, each so ﬁnely brown and so sharply spare,
they might have been brother and sister. On this ground indeed there would
have been a residuum of difference; such a sister having surely known in
respect to such a brother the extremity of separation, and such a brother
now feeling in respect to such a sister the extremity of surprise. (60, my
emphasis)

As Millicent Bell observes, this image suggests that Maria "is a sort of twin" to Strether in
that her "inability to live for herself" duplicates Strether's own inability to live for himself.8
He is also unable to make relations on his own at this point. What strikes him about

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Maria's appearance is his own loss of youth and consequently, his own inability to live.
James also indicates that Strether does not contemplate the diﬁ‘erent forms of appearance.
The "almost insolently young" appearance of a woman, who has used her eyes to a far
greater advantage than he has used his own, is enough to conﬁrse him. Although Strether
soon learns to put "the extremety of surprise" under the service of his imagnative faculty,
at this point, nursing his surprise as he does, and as the narrator humorously indicates,
Strether is too busy to make eﬂicacious use of his speculative eyes.

But as his imagination grows in reﬁnement we notice how he learns to see more
and more clearly. As James asserts in the Preface, it is Strether's "blest imagination" that
"help[s] him to discriminate" (AN 316). For the more thoroughly he uses his imagination,
the more sophisticated become his contemplative eyes. Thus, late in the novel while
conversing with Maria on his clear understanding of Mrs. Newsome, Strether builds
structures on Maria's foundation of the moral "block" that "[l]ittle by little looms up": "'I
see it all,’ he absently echoed, while his eyes might have been ﬁxing some particularly large
iceberg in a cool blue northern sea" (448). The inﬂexible Mrs. Newsome, as Strether sees
her now, is as hard and cold as an iceberg. He now sees beyond her digniﬁed surface into
her essential interior "as I've never done" (447). The image of the "iceberg," as James
points out through the use of the word "might," may very well be the product of a ﬁssion
between Strether's and the narrator's imagination. Or it may be Strether's own. For James
shows a connection between this image and an earlier image that is Strether's own. As he
observes Gloriani for the ﬁrst time in his garden and ponders the sculptor's great fame,
Lambert Strether's larnbent imagination comes in "contact" with "the light, with the
romance, of glory" which envelops this great sculptor. As a result he "had the
consciousness of opening to it, for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of
letting this rather grey interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old
geography" (199). The narrator, then, points out that this picture of a cool and even icy

world has originated in Strether's imaginative consciousness. The protagonist knows this

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northern world well because it has been his home in Woollett. Under the inﬂuence of
Paris, however, the imaginative world of "romance," and consequently the fervent and
sunny light of imagination have begun, quite early in the novel,9 to animate Strether's
consciousness that of old has known only the cool atmosphere of his rational faculty. And
now, late in the text, it has been suﬁciently warmed to move out of that chilly picture in
order to watch it from a distance. And as he watches it, his imaginative consciousness
develops it by adding the clear distinct details of a "large iceberg in a cool blue northern
sea."

But if James points out the ascendancy of Strether's imagination over the narrator’s
only in a subtle manner in the iceberg image, he later points it out more directly. In the
idyllic French country, losing himself in his reminiscences of the Lambinet he had failed to
buy in his youth, and in his enamored admiration of Mme de Vionnet, it seems to Lambert
Strether that he has himself stepped into a picture: "He really continued in the picture -
that being for himself his situation - and had not once overstepped the oblong gilt
frame" (457, my emphasis). And "the spell of the picture" is "essentially more than
anything else a scene and a stage, that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the
willows and the tone of the sky" (458). James suggests that Strether’s dependence on the
narrator's imaginative faculty for the creation of images, and thus of composing a vivid
picture gradually diminishes, while the narrator's dependence on Strether's increases. At
this late stage in the novel, Strether's picture has even developed into a dramatic "scene"

for him. And the scene continues to develop so smoothly that it ﬂows into other scenes:

Between nine and ten, [that is, just before Strether makes his last
visit to Mme de Vionnet's] at last, in the high clear picture - he was moving
in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas - he drew
a long breath: it was so presented to him from the ﬁrst that the spell of his
luxury wouldn't be broken. (474)

The " spell of his luxury" has issued from "the spell of the picture" that Strether develops in

the country. And if in the country he has conceived himself to be in one picture alone, now

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he conceives himself to be jumping in and out of several pictures, and with remarkable
ease too. Strether's imaginative faculty at last has developed the ability to create and
sustain images without being aided by the narrator‘s imaginative faculty. And his
imaginative independence shows how he has acquired his own narrative abilities, and thus
reads not only the interior that Marie veils, but his own contribution to the creation of that
cover. Strether’s shocked and climactic discovery of Marie de Vionnet's sexual intimacy
with Chad at last forces upon him the realization "that he had really been trying all along
to suppose nothing," that is, to imagine nothing about the Chad-Marie intimacy, simply to
prevent any distortion of his own straight and narrow notion of a virtuous relationship,
which seems to have grown out of the values of Woollett rationalism (468). To suppose
nothing is to glide from one "vain appearance" to another, that is, as though ﬁ'om one
picture to another in a gallery (204). And it strikes him now, just before his last visit to
Mme de Vionnet, as he upbraids himself for his momentary desire to relieve himself from
the ethical burden of "pay[ment]," that he is still indulging irresponsibly in fanciﬁrl illusions
(473). In short, Strether rebukes himself for constructing naive theories about ideal
conduct. Thus he directs his irony and mockery about his "spell of luxury" at himself, the
incisiveness of which ﬁnds clear expression in the self-portrayal as a subject who cannot
step out of the "clear" and unchanging, charming and illusory world of the "clever canvas"
into the unclear, complicated and conﬁlsingly ever-changing world of his actual
circumstances. At this late stage then, Strether's images show the coherence and
consistency that earlier in the text they do not show. Late in the novel Strether's
imaginative consciousness has indeed come along way.

In the beginning, it is Maria Gostrey who helps Strether to develop his imaginative
consciousness. For Maria shows him how to cultivate the imagination by playing around
with ungraspable notions: "In ignorance she could humour her fancy, and that proved a
useﬁll freedom" (98). In ultimately reﬁlsing to let Strether attach a name to the nameless
10

object of the Newsome industry, Maria arranges for herself the freedom to stray into

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speculation. In treating this article as unnameable, she ensures the continual exercise of her
imagination, and thus of her contemplative and analytical abilities. She teaches Strether
that to "Guess" is to make a meaning through the imagination (179). As she
"embroider[s]" with her imagination and lets it take its "own ﬂight," then, she teaches him
that in order to adapt himself to his new and unfathomable environment he must needs let
loose his imagination (101,192). Receiving his example ﬁ'om Maria, Strether realizes that
the only way to come to terms with Chad's remarkable transformation is to let his
imagination break out of "margin" (154). According to Strether, Mrs. Newsome has no
imagination not because she cannot conceive a well-planned text about Chad's life in Paris,
which she does, but because she does not use her imagination to speculate, to play with
the unknowable. Therefore she is like an iceberg that can thrive only in ﬁigid conditions,
conditions that she can fathom and therefore that must not change. Strether on the other
hand may begin as a sinking swimmer but, as he allows his imagination to break out of
margins, learns to be aware of, and thus to thrive in, unfathomable conditions.

As a result, Strether's imagination begins to stray and embroider, enabling him to
form connections between the outer expressions and inner being of the people around him.
As his imagination strays and embroiders at Chad's ﬁrst party, little Jeanne de Vionnet
ﬁnds herself in the presence of a soothing and mollifying element because of the absence
of the cold and direct medium of a piercing or inquisitive glance:

his fancy had begun so to stray and embroider that he ﬁnally found
himself; absent and extravagant, sitting with the child in a ﬁiendly silence.
Only by this time he felt her ﬂutter to have fortunately dropped and that she
was more at her ease. She trusted him, liked him, and it was to come back
to him afterwards that she had told him things. (248)

To "stray" is to deviate, but to deviate is for his imagination to turn away from the
prescribed way and thus to ﬁnd a new way, its own way. Thus he is described as
"walk[ing] round," taking a "linger[ing] walk," or "a long vague walk," and a "slow
reiterated ramble" (496,504, 287,79). Because he strays ("wander[s]"), he indulges in

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reveries ("wonder[s]"), as Strether himself realizes late in the novel: "I wondered and
wander " (493). Indeed, the ﬁrst syllable of Strether’s name ("stre") puns obviously on
"stray". Even as Strether‘s straying imagination embroiders on the shy and reticent Jeanne,
she becomes increasingly relaxed and receptive, which in turn enables his "deeply stirred"
imagination to deeply engage in "contemplations" (273). And through these
contemplations, as he spends a few quiet moments with Jeanne, the imaginative Strether
attempts to create connections between her inner being and outer expressions. Likewise,
when Strether observes Mamie, who is herself deeply immersed in contemplations in the
balcony of her hotel, he creates a connection between her inner being and outer
expressions. Thus at last he is able to "read a meaning" into the element of "mystery" that
envelops his encounters with her in Paris: "It had represented the possibility between them
of some communication - the possibility even of some relation as yet unacknowledged"
(3 78). There is no direct communication between them regarding Chad's transformation.
Thus it is only with his imagination that Strether guesses about Mamie's perception of a
remarkable change in Chad, and that therefore she is on his (Strether's) side rather than on
Sarah Pocock's. And late in the novel, when he tries to make Sarah realize that
"[e]verything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else," Strether
reveals a ﬁrm grasp of causal relationships which becomes possible because of the growth
in his orchestrative imagination (418).

And by granting Strether the imaginative ability to make such narrative
connections, James grants his center of consciousness a considerable degree of narrative
authority. James is so emphatic about Strether's ability to forge connections that he makes
the reﬂector pick the narrator's image of "brother and sister" that suggests a deep and
strong but simple and innocent bond between Strether and Maria and connect it with his
(Strether's) own "image of the Babes in the Wood" late in the novel: "They now took on
to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of the Babes in the Wood; they could trust

the merciful elements to let them continue in peace" (488). Strether has developed his own

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understanding of what the narrator hints about his subsequent relationship with Maria and
has found a concrete expression for it. Signiﬁcantly, he has taken the narrator‘s image and
made a story out of it. Also, he has taken the narrator's image farther with his suggestion
of the melancholy humor that he directs at himself for his ignorance and confusion. And
Strether has also taken the narrator‘s image farther with his suggestion of the surprise that
both he and Maria feel as a result of Chad's prolonged absence. Like the surprised and
unknowing Babes in the Ballad who wait in vain for their relief ﬁ'om the Woods, the
surprised and unknowing Strether and Maria, as he conceives, wait in vain for their relief
ﬁ'om the confusion that Chad's mysterious disappearance generates. The element of
"surpris[e,]" as Strether indicates to Maria a little earlier in the novel, has made him open-
minded, observant, and receptive to change (447). Even as James connects the narrator’s
image with the reﬂector's, he allows the latter’s to give an ironic twist to the formers, and
the latter's imagination to move beyond the former's.11

Indeed, Strether's imagination gradually creates an epistemological pattern as it
develops meanings. For the orchestrative imagination works in conjunction with the
perceptive imagination. To comprehend a meaning is to rely on one's own ability to create
coherence, and thus to gradually create a pattern with purpose and causality. Because
meanings gradually emerge for Strether, even when the diﬁ‘erent parts of a perception
make a meaning hang "beautiﬁllly together" to create an epistemological pattern, there is
"still a loose end" that has to be put in place (397). Strether's vital and dynamic
imagination meanders forward through intricate passages - as James writes in his Preface,
"through winding passages" - because of a desire to create or continue a pattern (AN 316).
For instance, when Strether hears Jim Pocock's fable of the Newsome females' quiet
feeding-time, he takes the metaphorical threads he ﬁnds in this fable and embroiders them

into an intricate design:

"They don't lash about and shake the cage," said Jun, who seemed pleased with his
analogy; "and it's at feeding-time that they're quietest. But they always get there."

163

'They do indeed - they always get there! " Strether replied with a laugh that justiﬁed
his confession of nervousness. He disliked to be talking sincerely of Mrs Newsome with
Pocock ...But there was something he wanted to know, a need created in him by her
recent intermission, by his having given from the ﬁrst so much, as now more than ever
appeared to him, and got so little. It was as if a queer truth in his companion's metaphor
had rolled over him with a rush. She had been quiet at feeding-time; she had fed, and
Sarah had fed with her, out of the big bowl of all his recent communication, his vividness

and pleasantness, his ingenuity and even his eloquence, while the current of her response
had steadily run thin. (333)

Strether develops Jim's metaphor of food by giving it a depth, and a concrete and speciﬁc
meaning: writing itself, that is, his own letters. The mother and daughter have been feeding
"out of the big bowl of all his recent ﬁee communication". And to Jim's metaphor of
keeping quiet in the cage Strether gives the speciﬁc meaning of Mrs. Newsome's
decreasing current of response. Thus the pattern-maker gadually seems to diminish the
loose ends and to continue to add to the pattern. Indeed "the gowing rose of observation
in which he could bury his nose even to wantonness" is Strether's romantic image for his
gradually developing imaginative consciousness (3 97). Late in the novel Strether, then,
comes a long way from the disillusioned protagonist whose "few genus" of consciousness
that do sprout out of his second visit to Paris seem to be the butt of James's inexorable
irony early in the novel (116). At that early stage Strether's erling "fancy" lavishes ﬁrtile
and "hungy gazes" at "lemon-coloured volumes" which create the illusion of "ﬂesh
ﬁrm on the tree" and which tempt him to fall into the banality and barrenness of
imperceptiveness (116).

The ﬁrst stage of the blossoming of Strether's narrative authority can be seen in his
decision to give Waymarsh a detailed account of his ﬁrst visit to the Boulevard
Malsherbes. James underlines the fact that Strether, who earlier "can't talk of [Mrs
Newsome]" to Maria (99), makes quite an ado about his role as a teller of the story of his
meeting with Chad's ﬁiend: "'I've all sorts of things to tell you!‘ - and he put it in a way
that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling" (129). In his

determination to "tell" Waymarsh about his ﬁrst experience at the Boulevard Malsherbes,

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and in his desire to "enjoy the telling, " Strether shows essential attributes of storytelling.
He intends to develop his manner of telling, to entertain the morose and rigid Waymarsh,
to ﬁnd his own way out of confusions, and to be morally aware. Thus, inexperienced in the
art of storytelling as he is at this point, Strether's burden becomes rather heavy and he
winds up with "I guess I don't know anything!" (131). But to be "reduced" to the state of
knowing "nothing" of Chad's story turns out to be an "enlarging" experience, for it makes
possible the rejection of the story of Chad's aﬁ‘air authored by Mrs. Newsome, and the
beginning of Strether’s own readings of the story of the relation that he ﬁnds for himself
when he comes to Paris (131). It also makes possible the rejection of his preconceived
uneasiness with "any acceptance of Paris" (118). As a teller, Strether establishes his desire
to begin at the beginning, that is, to be a reader, and thus to be a seeker with an open
mind: "I'm not a bit sure [about my not liking little Bilham for his liking Paris] - its one
of the things I want to ﬁnd out" (132).

To be the teller of a story, then, is also to be a reader and thus to make the attempt
to ﬁnd out about the self and the other as seekers. The scene of the watcher (Strether)
watching a watcher (little Bilham) at the end of Book Two is signiﬁcant because it points
out Strether's ﬁrst attempt to watch the watcher within and without. This scene
demonstrates Strether's ﬁrst glimpse of his realization that watching is a continual activity
because the subject of observation never yields stability and uniformity of interpretation:
"[Strether’s] interest [in watching] was aﬁ‘ected by the young man's not being Chad.
Strether wondered at ﬁrst if he were perhaps Chad altered" (124). Just as he watches the
other watcher, and realizes that the watcher is not Chad but an entirely different person,
so, as he ﬁnds out, the Chad of the present is an entirely diﬂ‘erent person from the Chad of
the past, and so, as he will ﬁnd out later, the present Strether is not the same as the past
Strether. This scene foreshadows Strether's subsequent understanding that to be a
continual seeker is to realize that nothing which is subjected to gowth is ever ﬁnal or

unchangeable. The object of observation, whether the self or the other turns out to be

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entirely different from his initial impression of that object, and thus, entirely beyond his
epistemological gasp:

The balcony, the distinguished ﬁ'ont, testiﬁed suddenly, for Strether's fancy,
to something that was up and up; they placed the whole case materially,
and as by an admirable image, on a level that he found himself at the end of
another moment rejoicing to think he might reach. The young man looked
at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid process,
was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of
luxuries. (125)

As "the distinguished front," the balcony is the alluring appearance that is well beyond
Strether‘s imaginative gasp. The watchers sense of being watched by another watcher,
however, results in the sudden spark of an aﬂinity between the two that places them
together as though in "a perched privacy". For watching the watcher makes Strether
faintly and vaguely aware of the self in the other and the other in himself. 12 Strether has
become vaguely aware that the distance which separates him ﬁ'om the watcher on "the
distinguished ﬁont" is also a distance that separates the Strether who "might reach" it ﬁom
the Strether on the street. He is beginning to be vaguely and intuitively aware of the
change in himself that is ahead. Thus the Strether on the street "rejoic[es] to think he
might reach" such an emblematic "level" and height ("up and up")13 and make some sense
of what is beneath the "distinguished ﬁont". For at this point his self-identity is only a vain
appearance: Who is this Lambert Strether, he wonders, whose name is on the "geen
covers" of a Review on "economics, politics, ethics" that after all is "no tribute to letters"
(117)? As in the preface James mentions that Strether's "view" "change[s]" ﬁ'om "geen"
to "yellow" (AN 314), so in the novel he demonstrates how the reﬂector moves ﬁ'om the
"geen" of imaginative immaturity to the "yellow" of imaginative maturity, for he moves
ﬁ'om the "geen" covers to the "lemon" covers, that is, ﬁ'om prosaic writing to imaginative

literature, for example, the works of "the geat romancer," Victor Hugo (276).

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His movement towards literary narratives, then, represents his quest for self-
identity. Although aware of his "reduced" condition, Strether struggles hard to preserve
his "little scrap of an identity" by way of the Review (100-101). But the Review only
points out to Mrs. Newsome's ambassador his dependence on Mrs. Newsome. As Susan
Mizruchi points out, an eﬁ‘ect of the "expanding consumer-capitalist world of mid
nineteenth- to early twentieth century America" can be felt in the ﬁagmentation within
selves that "throw[s] into question the very possibility of an integrated personality". 14 The
name on the geen cover does not reveal an integated personality, but the glaring absence
of one: "it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he
was Lambert Strether" (115). Consequently, it points out that Strether has become a
disposable commodity owned by Mrs. Newsome, and as such he is as deﬁcient in identity
as the nameless product manufactured by the Newsomes. According to Michael Wutz,
Strether's identity is "a borrowed one, existing as the extension of another person," and the
geen cover ﬁlnctions as "a paper carapace" that covers up his "real identity".15 But I
would suggest that at this point Strether's identity is not so much hidden as absent. Thus
Strether himself laments to little Bilham, "But what am I to myself?" (215). For Strether
the Review only points to "a little scrap of an identity" because it is an ironical comment
on his economic, political and ethical plight. It seems as though his self-identity depends
on his narrative authority.

Thus Strether, an editor of a moderate Woollett Review, ﬁnds it necessary to
develop into the reader of stories that are written in the appearances of other people. For
to make a meaning is to read a story. Thus, early in the text, he asks Maria, "You mean
that just your hour with him told you so much of [Chad's] story?" (179). It then is the
observant Maria's example that Strether follows as he tries to read "the whole of a story"
in Chad's genial tone and protective attitude towards Jeanne (218). But he fails to read the
"whole story" and reads only the story that Chad's appearance tells him. Likewise, it seems
to Strether that he has read Mme de Vionnet's "whole story" when she talks to him about

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her trust in Chad: "Her face, with what he had by this time gasped, told him more than
her words; whether something had come into it, or whether he only read clearer, her
whole story - what at least he took for such - reached out for him" (3 65). Although
Strether perceives Marie's "disguised suppressed passion" in her face, he takes this to be
the "whole" story only to realize later that her disguise works in more ways than he has
guessed, and that her "suppressed" passion is not quite the entire story (366).

Although these attempts to read the "whole" story contribute to Strether's
development as a reader, when he abandons his presumption of reading the "whole" story
he becomes a more acute reader. Thus when Mamie lets him know that her trip to Paris
has "suited" her well, Strether reads the "story of her being ready to help him" (3 84). It is
not the story of her entire life that he reads but a part of that entire story. And, in
Waymarsh's straw hat and buttonhole adorned with a fresh rose, Strether reads the "story"
of a particular phase in the forrner's life: his early morning "adventure" with Mrs. Pocock
at the Marche aux F leurs (406). Further, the "pieces" of the story of ambassadorship,
including the inﬂexible Sarah's representation of her mother, and the infatuated
Waymarsh's representation of Sarah, fall "into a close rapid order" for Strether as his
conversation with Waymarsh tells him "what had happened" between Sarah and
Waymarsh in Strether‘s absence (408). Strether becomes such a close reader of the
discrepancies between the stories that people tell him and the stories he reads in their
appearance that as he goes over the scene on the river he is quick to observe how Mme de
Vionnet's appearance has not "matched her story" (467).

Because he develops into an acute reader of other people's stories, Strether
develops into the teller of other people's stories. Thus he undertakes the telling of the
"wonderful story" that he himself comes to read as a result of Mme de Vionnet and her
work (362). In his letters to Mrs. Newsome, Strether tells the remarkable story of Chad's
remarkable transformation at Mme de Vionnet's capable hands. This story, the product of

Strether's sophisticated imagination, is reﬂective of his wonder and admiration for Marie

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de Vionnet's style. A "wonderful" story is a story about an admirably sophisticated and
intelligent, sensitive and passionate woman who has separated from her husband a long
time ago and who has amazingly accomplished a remarkable transformation in her lover.
Therefore a "wonderﬁrl" story is about an amazing and unfathomable gace and clearly has
nothing to do with petty and vulgar liaisons. Thus the point of view Strether establishes in
this story is Mme de Vionnet's, and consequently the opposite of the Woollett point of
view. As the teller of a "wonderful " story about the woman who ﬁlls him with wonder,
Strether seems to be in possession of Keats's "Negative Capability, that is, when a man is
capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason." 16 Strether is repeatedly struck and fascinated by the "wonderﬁll" Marie
de Vionnet because she is "so odd a mixture of lucidity and mystery" (354).

But by using the words "lucidity" and "type" James subtly indicates that as teller of
Mme de Vionnet's story Strether often reaches out for an epistemological gasp with the
arm of reason in deﬁance of negative capability. He depends upon her "lucidity" to guide
him through the "mystery" just as he depends on the simpliﬁcation of her mystifying
character to a certain extent with the help of her "type". When he sees a "deep person" in
Marie, it is important for him to smooth out some of his puzzlement with the help of
"harmony and reason" (476). Indeed, Strether‘s imagination fails him whenever he
separates his rational from his imaginative faculty. And, as a result of the occasional
encroachment of the Woollett values into Strether’s consciousness, he often does separate
these two faculties. This may well have been one reason why James, in the Preface,
emphatically points out that, although Strether possesses "imagination galore," he does
not possess "imagination in predominance" (AN 310). As Strether himself is aware, he
clings to "reason" so stubbornly that it might even appear perverse: it strikes him that he
attempts "to show [Sarah Pocock] how, even perversely, he clung to his rag of reason"
(420). He argues emciently, as Maria Gostrey discovers early in the novel, and thus

prefers to be consistently dependent on "reason" (190). But the "only logic" (the logic of

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conscience that prevents him ﬁom getting any tangible beneﬁts) that he can cling to at the
novel's conclusion and which does not tear into shreds as a consequence, is the result of
the "wonderﬁll impressions" he has received with the help of his imaginative faculty (512).
Whenever he tries to make an epistemological gasp with the help of reason alone,
Strether feels disturbed. For example, he comprehends, and is touched by, the sincerity in
Mme de Vionnet's utterance about the happiness to give rather than to receive, but he is
"puzzled" because there is another shade in "the quaver of her quietness" which he cannot
reasonably explain, and thus he is "troubled" (481).

Strether‘s attempt to reasonably explain everything manifests itself in his troubled
attempt to tell "All" about Marie de Vionnet (362). To try to tell "all" is to try to gasp
something that is beyond his reach, for there will always be something about Marie or
about her relationship with Chad that he will not be able to interpret or explain, as the
image of "the clouds of explanation" suggests (157). When Mme de Vionnet asks Strether
to tell Mrs. Newsome "all," he takes the word in its literality, and therefore does not
understand what she means (242). Thus in reply he asks in puzzlement "All?" (242). What
she means is for Strether speciﬁcally to tell Mrs. Newsome "all" that is of any signiﬁcance,
that is, to tell Mrs. Newsome that he "like[s]" Marie herself and her daughter (243). For
"truth" to Marie is not an all-inclusive concept but the interpreters particular impression:
"any truth" (242). As he attempts to tell "all" of Mme de Vionnet's story to Mrs.
Newsome, Strether does not conceive of a particular impression but of several
impressions. So voluminous are these impressions that Strether‘s letters to Mrs. Newsome
are marked by an "unimpaired ﬁequency," which only indicates that "their problem" has
become "more complicated" (246). The problem, as James subtly implies, begins when
Strether attempts to tell the entire story of Chad's relationship with a special woman and
to explain why he (Strether) ﬁnds her so adorable. For soon after Strether thinks that he
has told "all" about Marie to Mrs. Newsome he feels dissatisﬁed with himself as the teller

of her story (282). Thus, in response to Mrs. Newsome's telegam, the frustrated Strether

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devotes himself to the "copious composition of a letter," which represents his role as
storyteller, only to tear up "the numerous sheets of his unﬁnished composition into
small pieces" (287). It seems to him that instead of giving all the facts that make up the
whole story in his letters, he has "acquired some hollow trick" (301).

The attempt to tell Marie's whole story, however, enables Strether ultimately to
discover its ungaspability. Amidst all the relics of the past Strether ﬁnds the emblem of
the gandeur of human accomplishments that have made a mark even on Chad. But as he
looks around her apartments, he is overwhelmed by "all the indescribable," that is, "all"
that he feels but that is beyond his ability to describe and narrate just as he feels it (362).
Strether has not managed to read and therefore to tell Marie's whole story, for as he sees
the wonderful story, it continues to change and therefore does not end: It is full of the
promise of future possibilities for Chad. As he tells the young man (who "might after all be
capable of much [harm] "), "for you, from such a woman there will always be something to
be got" (502). Further, mystiﬁed as he is by the woman in whom "there was always more
behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that," Strether is hardly in the
position to gasp and to narrate Marie's whole story (481). And as his interpretations
continue to change, so his telling is never complete, and so the epistemological patterns he
creates are never complete.

When he abandons the ungaspable project of telling a whole story about a person,
Strether develops the ability to take control of a point of view. He comes to realize, as he
tells Miss Barrace, that certain "links" will be "missing" and certain "connexions" will
remain "unnamed, " but that does not prevent the tellers from entering "the heart of their
subject" and interpreting a purpose (403). He now realizes that although the tellers may
not receive and articulate the whole story, they receive "the whole point" (403, my
emphasis). Late in the novel, then, Strether comes a long way ﬁ'om the time when certain
words appear "exorbitant" (244). He has acquired an ease with words now as a result of

the gowth in his imaginative consciousness. If he laments that his relationship with Chad

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has become "horribly complex," then it is because he no longer expresses Chad's "point of
view" (488). And although his point of view may be sympathetic to Mme de Vionnet's, in
his decision to return home Strether shows how he also moves away from her point of
view.

Mme de Vionnet herself urges upon Strether the need to develop his own speciﬁc
view. Marie de Vionnet, the artist who creates a remarkable text in the transformed Chad,
is interested in Strether's development and articulation of his own point of view and his
own style. Thus to Strether's question, "Hasn't Chad talked to you [of his mother]?" she
thoughtftu replies, "Yes, a geat deal - immensely. But not from your point of view"
(282). Strether’s own manner of telling will reveal his own interpretive imagination. Marie
de Vionnet is well aware that an interpreter, although aware of diﬁ‘erent points of view,
cannot be emotionally and intellectually committed to various points of view, and
therefore cannot be persuasive about the various points of view that circulate in the
environment. The interpreter, then, needs to develop her own speciﬁc point of view alone,
and thus her own manner of conveying that perspective. She asks Strether to "Tell [Mrs
Newsome] I've been good for [Chad] " because she is convinced that this is what Strether
himself "think[s]" (244). She has now set her mind to help Strether develop an eloquence
that can persuade Mrs. Newsome into a new point of view.

And the discovery of his own point of view leads Strether to tell his own story.
Thus after the Pococks' departure he gives Maria "the view, vivid with a hundred more
touches than we can reproduce, of what happened for him that morning," that is, the
morning of the Pococks' departure (442). As the narrator points out, Strether gives Maria
a view of what has "happened for him" and not of what has happened for the Pococks.
And to tell about what has "happened" on a particular occasion, James suggests, is to tell a
short story, as it were. Strether, then, has begun to exert narrative authority over a short
story about his own life. And if the narrator cannot "reproduce" the "hundred touches"

that Strether produces, then in a manner, these hundred touches are beyond the narrator's

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narrative gasp. If Strether's imaginative consciousness continues to gow in reﬁnement
and thus his ability to create images moves beyond the narrator's, it is not surprising that
the narrator at this late stage in the novel cannot "reproduce" the center of consciousness's
copious singular "touches".

And now that Strether has found the narrative authority to tell a story about
himself, he enters the picture he sees around him in his excursion into the country and
becomes part of his surroundings: "Not a single one of his observations but somehow fell
into a place in it; not a breath of the cooler evening that wasn't somehow a syllable of the
text. The text was simply, when condensed, that in these places such things were, and that
if it was in them one elected to move about one had to make one's account with what one
lighted on" (458). James's emphasis on "these" brings out the signiﬁcance of the
environment for Strether's self. Paul Beidler observes that in this scene Strether jumps out
of the world of ﬁction, the painting within the We as it were, and steps on the ﬂame of
the painting, and thus "ﬁom his story to ours, " for it is here that Strether "leaves his past
as a ﬁctional hero and steps back to read his own story as it unfolds from a detached
vantage point".17 And Armstrong observes that Strether's attempt "to understand others
...increases his understanding of himself."18 I would go further and say that, as a result, he
now realizes that his own story comes out of and blends with other people's stories: "he
had never yet so struck himself as engaged with others and in midstream of his drama"
(457-458). The center of consciousness has "elected to move about" these places because
of his recognition of the interconnection between himself and the surroundings which
include the space and the people. Indeed, Strether's understanding of his own connection
with the human community has loomed so large for him at this point that he has "peopled
all his space" (458). According to William Goetz, in the country Strether's imagination
"sets him up for his geatest fall in the novel, a fall which will almost wreck him".l9
Certainly Strether indulges in some self-deception in this scene, but what makes it

remarkable is that he is himself aware of his "happy illusion" (457). Thus, as he sits in the

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little building and watches the human scene on the river from his "post," a scene that
"sharp[ly] arrest[s]" his attention, James suggests that he represents the artist in his house
of ﬁction (460): The "small and primitive pavilion that, at the garden's edge, almost
overhung the water" and that includes a "platform, slightly raised" and "a protecting rail
and a projected roof" (459), is a version of the J amesian house of ﬁction because here
Strether's imaginative consciousness indulges in reading and creating ﬁctions as though he
continues to look through "the oblong window of the picture-frame" even as be closely
observes and interprets the human scene, as it unfolds for him on the symbolical water,
from his balconied aperture (452). It may appear as though the connection he feels with
his environment is only an ironic connection, and therefore simply a misreading on
Strether's part. But because he becomes a part of this environment, he is able to
comprehend that the couple in the boat have such an "expert, familiar, ﬁequent" air about
them "that this wouldn't at all events be ...[their] ﬁrst time [on this river]" (461). And
because Strether looks out of the house of ﬁction, he ﬁnds his emotional and social
connections with this environment which enable him to recoglize and identify the young
man and woman as Chad and Marie. It leads to Strether's recognition of the complex
"intimate" relationship between Chad and Mme de Vionnet, and of his own "intervention"
that has "absolutely aided and intensiﬁed their intimacy": "he had absolutely become,
himself, with his perceptions and his mistakes, ...almost an added link and certainly a
common priceless gound for them to meet upon" (47 7-478). His own story in Paris, then,
is part of "the typical tale of Paris, " and to be "mixed up" with it is not simply to be mixed
up with "the little" and the banal, "the ﬁerce" and "the sinister," but also with "the acute"
(472).

What makes his own story, which is part of the tale of Paris, especially "acute" is
his understanding that, like Paris, there is nothing ﬁnal and stable within himself. "[W]hat I
want is a thing I've ceased to measure or even to understand" (443). He cannot measure

and therefore does not understand what he "want[s]" because he understands the principle

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of constant change within himself. He now understands that there must be "room" for all
the "alteration" of his interpretations (447). According to Kaston, Strether ultimately fails
"to change enough to lay claim to the material of his life and the novel."20 But as James
implies, late in the novel Strether begins to understand that his life is to continue
"transforming beyond recogiition," and that he has come a long way ﬁ‘om the time when
he has conceived it as a "conveniently uniform thing" (497). As Bell asserts, Strether is "a
man of artistic sensibility who ﬁnds his life to have been a story inadequately told - and
must ﬁnd a way of still telling it."21 I would add that late in the novel Strether
demonstrates his artistic sensibility in such a way that he makes his life the story that
continues to change. His life becomes the story in which there will always be the "margin"
for his revisions. For "alteration" is the basic plot of the story of his life.

By contrast, as author of her own version of Chad's life in Paris, Mrs. Newsome is
thoroughly opposed to any kind of "alteration". Julie Rivkin argues that Mrs. Newsome is
"almost a parody of the absent author who 'works the whole thing out in advance' only to
ﬁnd the scheme revised in the act of execution".22 Thus when a revision has been made by
her ﬁrst, deviating ambassador, she tries to armul the revision by sending a new delegation.
As Mrs. Newsome resists change so she resists gowth. In her opposition to any kind of
alteration, it is also possible to see in Mrs. Newsome the stance of a historian who claims
to have found an absolute truth, and who therefore does not acknowledge the role of the
interpretive and orchestrative imagination, and thus of the inventive faculty, on the
narrative of history. 23 As he notices Mrs. Newsome's unopened letter to her daughter
while he waits in Sarah's hotel room, Strether becomes engossed by "the sharp
downstrokes of her pen" because "they stood for a probable absoluteness in any decree
of the writer" (3 75). Mrs. Newsome's unopened letter to Sarah momentarily evokes the
sense of "a sudden queer power to intensify the reach of its author" in Strether (3 75). In
the past he has been persuaded so effectively by her narrative of Chad's life that the

thought of seeing the woman in Chad's life does not even occur to him on his own. This is

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what Strether presumably remembers as he observes her unopened letter to her daughter,
and what he ﬁnds "queer" about the "power" of this "author". It is a "queer" power that an
author exercises when the impact of the text on the reader is to make the latter
unquestioning. But J ames's attention to the sharp downstrokes points out that truth for
Mrs. Newsome is rigid, stable and unchangeable: it is "absolute". Thus there is "no room
[and] no margin" for revision in the text she authorizes relying on the fact of Chad's
disinclination to return home (447). In turning away ﬁ'om the letter, then, Strether
symbolically expresses his rejection of Mrs. Newsome's narrative authority: "He looked at
Sarah's name and address ...as if he had been looking hard into her mother’s face, and then
turned away ﬁ'om it as if the face had declined to relax" (375-376). It seems to Strether as
he turns away ﬁ'om the sealed letter that he turns away ﬁ'om the impermeable Mrs.
Newsome herself, and thus from whatever narrative authority she has exercised on him in
the past.24

What James implies by making Strether see Mrs. NWsome in her letter is that, as
a consequence of the collapse of her narrative authority, she has been stripped of the
status of an author and reduced to the objectiﬁed status of the text that she has authored.
Strether himself articulates this view when he tells Maria, "there's no room left; no margin
for any alteration. She's ﬁlled as full, packed as tight, as she'll hold" (447). Strether’s
concept of "alteration" suggests his point of view that both reader and writer have nothing
ﬁnal or absolute to claim. But Mrs. Newsome, who adamantly reﬁrses to budge ﬁom the
text she authorizes, proves to be nothing more than hard "cold thought" (447). For she has
become a self-limiting text that insists on a single interpretation. In Strether's eyes, then,
she becomes equivalent to the text she has authored. One reason why Mrs. Newsome is
physically absent ﬁ'om James's novel is because she has failed to establish herself as an
individual. As she has become a superﬁcial text what we are given is a superﬁcial glimpse

' of her letter. We are given a glimme only into the form and never the content of her letter

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because her text lacks the depth that provokes continual interpretive eﬁ‘orts. Thus the
form of her text is expressive of the content which resists change.

A way in which Strether's understanding of the principle of change manifests itself
is through his awareness that his changing imaginative consciousness continually alternates
between the stages of perceptual gowth and decline. It is possible to see the cause of this
perceptual decline in the periodic resurgence of the Woollett values in Strether that make
him separate his rational faculty ﬁ'om his imaginative faculty mentioned earlier. Strether
conceives the perceptual decline in his consciousness as an abyss of conﬂrsion and
inﬁrmity.25 Thus when he experiences a resurgence of Woollett rationalism his
imaginative consciousness seems to plunge violently down into an abyss: "if Maurie were
as pretty as Woollett published her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to be so
swept away by Woollett's opinion that this consequence really let loose for the imagination
an avalanche of others" (3 24). The Woollett air of sound sense brought in by the new
ambassadors of Mrs. Newsome thrusts Strether's consciousness ﬁ'om its perch and
overburdens it, and consequently, like an "avalanche," it plunges uncontrollably down to
the stage of decline. And later, when the Woollett values encroach into him again and stir
within him the thought of "wrongdoer[s]," and of "the silver stream of impunity," and thus
when he "revert[s] in thought to his old tradition, the one he had been brought up on," it
seems to him that he once again loses perceptual gound and tumbles down (473): "This
was a deeper depth than any, and with no foresight, scarcely with any care, as to what he
should bring up. He almost wondered if he didn't look demoralized and disreputable"
(474). He feels "demoralized and disreputable" because at this moment his imaginative
faculty has been overpowered by the world of Woollett rationalism. Thus whenever
Strether’s rational faculty is disconnected from his imaginative faculty, the result is his
sense of abysmal confusion. But if his consciousness drops into a metaphorical abyss of
imperceptiveness as a result of perceptual decline, then it also gains new gound as a result

of perceptual growth. Thus the sexual element in Marie's relationship with Chad becomes,

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for Strether, a "technical" matter that does not displace the "virtu[ous]" element: "[Little
Bilham's calling the Marie-Chad relationship a "virtuous attachment] was but a technical
lie - he classed the attachment as virtuous. That was a view for which much was to be said
- and the virtue came out for me hugely" (493). Consequently, on his last visit to Chad, his
message "placed his present call immediately on solid gound" (499).

In his Preface, James illustrates his understanding of a rhythm of gowth and
decline in his protagonist's consciousness through the image of circular movement. Thus
he writes, "The revolution performed by Strether ...was to have nothing to do with any
berise of the imputably 'tempted' state; ...his lifelong trick of intense reﬂexion ...was to
bring him out through alternations of darkness and light" (AN 316). Strether makes a
"revolution" not simply because his consciousness undergoes radical change. Nor is it
simply because, like a celestial body,26 a planet, that makes its "revolution" around
another celestial body, a star, Strether revolves around another character (for example,
Mrs. Newsome or Mme de Vionnet) whom he has undertaken to represent. He makes a
"revolution" also because, like a celestial body in a star system, he makes cyclical
movements, and these motions (or this performance) suggest a circular rhythm, as does
the image of "compass" discussed earlier. To make a "revolution," as Teahan argues, is to
make a turn, a deviation.27 To make a circular pattern is also to make a turn. For the
circular pattern involves not simply a forward movement, but also a backward movement
in the sense that the line of the circle returns, or turns back, to the point of origin. The line
of the circle moves on forward until it reaches a climax and then arcs down to move
backward, but ﬁom that downward are it curves up to reach the climax again. When
James writes that Strether performs a "revolution," he implies that by continually moving
out of and returning to the point at which he begins, the protagonist moves continually
through "alternations of darkness and light," and thus his consciousness moves forward as

it gows in sophistication, and turns backward as it moves down into decline.

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Interestingly, Strether too makes use of a circular image, the Beme clock, near the
end of the novel in connection with his understanding of the rhythm of gowth and decline,
that is, of performance and waiting, within his consciousness. Thus, on the eve of his
departure Maria and Strether look back in time at a succession of events they have lived

through, and he talks about his having gone "in" after having come "out":

He was out, in truth, as far as it was possible to be, and must now rather
bethink himself of getting in again. He found on the spot the image of his
recent history; he was like one of the ﬁgures of the old clock at Beme.
They came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in
the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too jigged his little course
- him too a modest retreat awaited. (509)

Strether has become so adept at creating coherent images late in the novel that he comes
up with "the image of his recent history," that is, the image of the story of his visit to
Paris. Not only does he comprehend what has happened to him, but he also ﬁnds a concise
image to represent that story. Thus as a result of Strether's interest in reading stories
closely and in telling stories articulately, out of the incoherence of changeability and
instability, he brings some kind of coherence into his life. As he now thoroughly realizes,
this story is about the continual change in his consciousness as it alternates between the
stages of gowth or performing and of decline or waiting. After his own performance
("jigg[ing] ...in the public eye") comes his motionlessness ("modest retreat"). What he has
not realized earlier is that the moment of motionlessness is as necessary as the moment of
performance. Thus, early in the novel as he speaks with little Bilham in Gloriani's garden,
he conceives himself as futilely waiting at the station ﬁ'om which "the train" of life has
pulled out without him (215). Now he realizes that the motionlessness sigriﬁes his
moment of rest. If he has earlier failed to board the train of life, and if he feels himself
waiting even as he speaks with little Bilham, then later, as his Beme clock image of jigging
ﬁgures sigliﬁes, he is engaged in action. Even a little earlier, although Strether begins to

perceive the "charm" of "postponements," the charm is "melancholy": He wonders if he is

179

heading towards "the wind up of his career" (488-489). But at the end of the novel
Strether shows through his image of the jigging and waiting ﬁgures on the Beme clock,
how he himself realizes the relation between waiting and performing. Because of this
understanding Strether now conceives himself as in "full possession of the key to what
has lately happened," that is, as exerting narrative authority over the story of his life (498).
"[A]nd the effect of it was to enable him quite to play with the key [to what had lately
happened]" (499). To "play" with it, James suggests, is the eﬂ‘ect of Strether's having
made the narrative connection between the stage of gowth, or performance, and the stage
of decline, or waiting, in the story of his changing consciousness.

In the Preface James suggests that the protagonist's experience of waiting and
performance bears a curious resemblance to the novel's experience of "breaks and
resumptions":

'The Ambassadors' had been, all conveniently, 'arranged for'; its ﬁrst

appearance was ﬁ'om month to month, in 'The North American Review'

during 1903, and I had been open ﬁom far back to any pleasant

provocation for ingenuity that might reside in one's actively adopting—so as

to make it, in its way, a small compositional law--recurrent breaks and

resumptions. I had made up my mind here regularly to exploit and enjoy

these often rather rude jolts-having found, as I believed, an admirable way

to it (AN 317).
The "compositional law" of "breaks and resumptions" that James makes up his mind to
enjoy ﬁnds its way into the "scheme" he adopts for his protagonist. It then is possible to
see that "the admirable way" to handle the "rude jolts" is to create the consciousness of a
similar pattern of "breaks and resumptions" for the protagonist. Strether then becomes a
ﬁgure for the novel itself. Further, as the protagonist conceives his going "in" and waiting,
so James conceives the "ins" which mark the composition's entry into its "problem" (AN
319). Likewise, as the protagonist conceives his coming "out" and performing, so James

conceives the "outs" which mark the composition's exit from its "problem" (AN 319). And

Strether realizes that although the stage of performance may be "little," and consequently

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changes or breaks oﬁ‘ and gives way to that of motionlessness, the rhythm of performance
and motionlessness does not break.

To "jig" is perhaps to engage in an act that is ﬁivolous, but also exhilarating.
According to Pierre Walker, Strether's use of "jig" instead of "dance" indicates the
protagonist's deprecatory attitude towards his own eﬁ‘orts to achieve anything. Walker
argues that Strether's image of the Beme clock, which includes his image of himself as one
of the mechanical bears, expresses Strether's "sense of futility."28 But, as James points out
through the indeterminacy of the image, it is also possible to see that the jig is a lively
dance. And as such it is suggestive not simply of ﬁivolities and belittling activities, but of a
buoyant celebration of life, and thus of stimulating and rejuvenating activity. According to
Allen F. Stein, the mechanical ﬁgures of the Berne clock are an image of circularity that
expresses Strether‘s "despairing deterministic outlook": James depicts the circular quest
romance of Romantic literature in "realistic" terms which show that, although he sees a
victory of consciousness in his protagonist that separates him from the mechanical ﬁgures
of the clock, Strether‘s impression of "having travelled in a circle" makes him sardonically
"see himself as having run almost mechanically a preordained course of circularity. "29 But
J arnes gives his readers the freedom of choice to see the Beme clock image not simply as
Strether's image of circularity with a sardonic twist to his "victory of consciousness". For
it also suggests Strether's ability to laugh healthily at himself. Thus it shows his coming to
terms with the breaks and resumptions in the perceptual growth of his consciousness, even
without separating himself from the mechanical ﬁgures.

By the end of the novel, then, Strether shows how he comes to terms with
transitoriness. If the ﬁgures of the Beme clock go into an enclosure, they also come out
into the open and resume their course. Consequently, if Strether conceives himself as
having no choice but to go "in," he also conceives himself as having the ﬁ'eedom to come
"out" repeatedly. Thus he now shows awareness of how he receives and makes use of his

little freedom of action over and over again. If early in the novel Strether laments not

181

having even "the illusion of freedom," then late in the novel he realizes that he too has the
freedom to act, however brief that action may be (215). The hour of freedom certainly is
transient. This is why "the clock of ...freedom" that Strether has heard in Paris evokes his
consciousness of his own "ﬂeeting hour" (215). Indeed, as Adeline Tintner observes, the
image of clocks in this novel is expressive of transience and the approach of death.30
Early in the novel the clock of freedom ticks so loudly in Strether's consciousness that it
reminds him more of transitoriness than of freedom. Thus, in the garden of the Tuileries,
"[h]e watched little brisk ﬁgures, ﬁgures whose movement was as the tick of the geat
Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point" (111). At that point, the
ﬂeeting hour evokes such a sense of the diminution of the ﬁ'eedom of action in Strether
that he reads the actions of humans as mechanically contrived and controlled movements
of stiﬁ‘ little ﬁgures. For, at that point, he does not conceive their little movements as
having the order and harmony of the pattern of a dance. But late in the novel, when
Strether conceives himself as a ﬁgure among other ﬁgures, whose story is a part of the
story of others, what he observes is his own "mistakes" and his "perceptions".
Consequently he observes not simply the little controlled movements of little ﬁgures but,
as his use of the word "jig" reveals, also a pattern of steps that is created by these little
ﬁgures who dance to the rhythm of gain and loss. As his image of himself as a ﬁgure that
jigs in and out on the Beme clock suggests, Strether shows how he has learned to keep
time with time. Indeed, it is because of the gowth of his imaginative consciousness that
Strether is no longer dejected or agonized by the transience of time and the sense of loss.
Consequently, to return home is the only logic that holds for Strether because with
his return, although his consciousness once again faces the stage of decline and of loss, it
will also move into a new stage of gowth and of gain. According to Kaston, Strether's
return home is the consequence of his ﬁlial relationship with Mrs. Newsome.31 But as he
no longer has any relationship and interaction with Mrs. Newsome, this can hardly be the

case. As Nicola Bradbury claims, Strether has to return home in order to preserve "the

182

ﬁ'eedom of his imaginative experience".32 Bradbury also claims that Strether's displaced
position, his separation from his ﬁiends in Paris, and his consequent isolation are necessary
for the preservation of this experience. Isolation, however, is not all that Strether is
moving towards. For he now sees himself ready to live the life of an individual among
other individuals. Thus, however secluded his life may become in Woollett, it will still be a
life among other lives. Strether has to go home because he refuses to be dependent upon
anyone. To stay on with Maria would be to depend on her "exquisite service, of lighted
care, for the rest of his days" (511-512). He has to go home because he cannot be Mme de
Vionnet's, or anybody else's, ambassador anymore. Thus The Ambassadors ends when
Strether's role as an ambassador ends. His return to Woollett then, is also his deviation
from the ambassadorial role. In Paris we notice several ambassadors in Strether alone: he
turns from representing Mrs. Newsome to Chad, and then he turns from representing
Chad to Mme de Vionnet. Consequently, as Rivkin observes, in Paris Strether "denies
himself experience in his own person" as a result ofhis ambassadorial functions.33 1 would
suggest that late in the novel such a denial almost pushes him to a kind of metaphorical
death: Strether‘s life is "essentially ...[brought] down ...to a ﬁrnction all subsidiary" to the
life of other people (427). In other words, as an ambassador if he moves up to ﬁnding
himself as a part of a goup, then as such he also moves down to losing his personal life.
Thus, once he ﬁnds his own place in the pattern created by the goup of dancing ﬁgures,
and thus once he understands the story of his own life, in returning to Woollett although
he may no longer be part of a goup, as a result he will begin to live his own personal life.
Also, the return to Woollett illustrates that he is now ready to establish connection with
his remote past.

For late in the novel Strether ﬁnds his gasp of the narrative thread of his past,
present, and ﬁrture. It seems to Strether at the beginning of the novel that he lacks the
connecting thread between his own past and present so thoroughly that the one seems

irrevocably ﬁagmented ﬁom the other. It is in Chester that he begins to be "quite

183

disconnected from the sense of his past" (59). As a result he is agonized by his memories
of his past failures as well as an unreachable past. And thus he is stuck with an "empty
present" (114). For the sense of being disconnected ﬁ'om the past "had begun ...upstairs
[in his hotel room in Chester] and before the dressing-glass that struck him as blocking
ﬁlrther, so strangely, the dimness of the window" (59). The window represents Strether's
bedimmed actual world of the present moment. And, as its view is blocked, Strether ﬁnds
himself alienated ﬁ'om this actual world of the present moment. The dressing-glass on
which he sees his reﬂected form, and which blocks the view, represents Strether's shadowy
past. And the image on the glass represents the shadowy identity that is alienated ﬁ'om his
present world.34 According to Allen Menton, Strether ﬁnds his past through a direct
experience of Paris and not an indirect experience of French literature.35 And according
to Armstrong, "by depicting a character's present perception of a scene through an
anticipatory account of how he or she will remember it," James "couples future and
past".36 I would add that Strether connects his past, present, and future because he learns
to draw the connection between the signiﬁcant stages of his gowth as a watcher. Walking
to and ﬁ'om the Boulevard Malsherbes for the last time, J arnes's reﬂector consciously
draws a connection between his "ﬁrst" and "last" days in Paris when he watches the ﬁgure
on Chad's "balcony" (496-497), and again when he watches Chad's face "under the street-
larnp" (504). As James highlights Strether's ability to watch once again, so he highlights
the "street-lamp," the light which enables him to watch once again. And if the word
"street" subtly and vaguely evokes the ﬁrst syllable of the reﬂector's last name, then the
word "lamp" subtly and vaguely evokes the ﬁrst syllable of his ﬁrst name, drawing a
connection between the past and ﬁlture Lambert Strether. Indeed, when Strether ﬁrst
looks up at the continuous balcony of Chad's apartments and wonders about the possibility
of being seen "in time" from that position, what he muses over is "the ﬁne relation of part
to part, and space to space," implicitly suggesting a connection between space and time
(124). And when he takes his last look at that balcony he weaves the thread of connection

184

between these two scenes (of the ﬁrst and last days) through a few other scenes involving
the watcher on the balcony. In one of these other scenes, as he waits alone for Chad on
the latter's balcony late at night, he spends "a long time" seeing himself as part of a series
of contemplative, solitarily waiting observers, little Bilham, Mamie, and Chad, as they
have "hung over" the balcony (426). In each of these scenes, then, Strether sees himself
through "time" - past, present, and ﬁrture - as he takes up the posture of watching the
watcher. Standing beyond the picture he watches, Strether shows a certain perceptive
gasp over the stages of watching: He traces how he begins as a watcher who looks up at
a watcher (little Bilham) on the balcony from a distance, moves up to observing the
watcher (Mamie) from the room with which the balcony is attached, that is from a
diminished distance, and then ﬁnally moves to the balcony itself as he watches the watcher
within himself. As a result of the gowth of his imaginative consciousness, Strether has
found the narrative thread of the past, present, and ﬁlture with which to connect the three
stages he moves through as a watcher. Thus, standing in the third storey of the Boulevard
Malsherbes, although at ﬁrst Strether sees only a "vague vista of the successive rooms"
(425), after his contemplation the vista is no longer vague, for "he passed back into the
rooms, the three that occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors," and
which represent the past, present, and ﬁlture (426, my emphasis). In the past Strether's
loss of a monetarily opulent ﬁrture would have been a tremendous loss because in the past
all he could conceive of the future was a blank. But now, as he has found the narrative
thread of his life, the ﬁlture is no longer a blank. Thus to Maria's question "To what do
you go home?" his reply is, "I don't know. There will always be something" (511).
Although he does not possess the details of the ever-changing story of his life, he
possesses the narrative thread to make connections within these details.

Consequently, Strether ultimately ﬁnds his self-identity.3 7 Early in the novel, it is
Strether's sense of the absence of connection between his past and his present, and thus his

sense of fragnentation, that prevents him ﬁom seeing any meaning in the name on the

185

geen cover. Kaston ﬁnds Strether "only Strether" despite his transformation (just as the
latter ﬁnds Chad "only Chad" despite his transformation): "[implicitly] he is still
prototypically ambassadorial. "38 But James suggests that at the end of the novel, the
name that is no longer ﬁxed on the geen cover suggests several meanings. As he has
learned to connect his past with his present, he does not deny his identity as "Chad's
mother's emissary" (497). And his name also suggests the adjective "straighter." As
Teahan claims, "'Strether' puns conspicuously on 'straight' and 'straighter.'"39 As Strether
learns to connect his present with his past and his ﬁrture, he realizes that he can only try to
be straighter now and in the ﬁlture than he has been in the past. According to Ellmann,
"[a]s the hero of the novel, Strether surrenders his identity to difference. "40 But it seems
to me that he does not so much surrender his identity to diﬁ‘erence as create an identity on
the basis of change. Thus now the name Strether also stretches to suggest the noun:
"stretcher": As he stretches because he learns to connect his past identity with his present,
so he stretches because he changes. Thus if in the past he has been piqued by "his
meageness that sprawled stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland," then, as
a result of all the changes he experiences, it is no longer his "meageness" that stretches,
but an ample imaginative consciousness (117, my emphasis). As Rivkin asserts, "what
Strether will discover as he replaces one truth about experience with another is that there
is no stopping point in this logic of revision, no superlative that will stand beyond all
comparison".41 It seems to me that this is why James uses the word "straighter" to
indicate the comparative degee as for the gowth of his composition, so for the gowth of
his protagonist (AN 307). Strether's understanding of the comparative case makes him
come to terms with Chad as a "little" ﬁgure who is "only Chad" and as an example of
remarkable transformation at the same time (494,482). It is this same understanding that
James expects of his readers in coming to terms with his protagonist who is

simultaneously a little ﬁgure and an example of remarkable transformation.

1 86
Notes

1. Henry James, M ed. R W. B. Lewis (1934; rpr. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1984) 317. Cited parenthetically as AN.

2. Henry James, IheAmhassadms (1903; London: Penguin Books, 1986) 181.

3. Maud Ellmann, "'The Intimate Diﬁ‘erence': Power and Representation in The
Ambassadors," WW ed. F. A Bell (Totowa: Vision and
Barnes and Noble, 1984) 100. According to Ellmann, "A site of transformation, Paris is
most itself when least itself, passing towards a new translated form of being" (101). And in
his reading of W in WW
Seeing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Merle A. Williams discusses "the
constantly changing phenomena that surround .. .[Strether]" and "the steady emergence of
meaning in a variety of forms" (55,60).

4. The image of water, as I see it in IhLAmhassadors represents changeability
and instability. On a different note, Reginald Abbott in his essay "The Incredible Floating
Man," in HenIyJameLReyiem 11 (1990), associates the image of water with dangerous
"feminine forces of the deep" (178). And for Tony Tanner, in "The Watcher ﬁ'om the
Balcony: Henry James's W" in Welly 8.1 (1966), the
image of water in this novel is metaphorical of experience (41). Tanner observes that in
this novel James depicts a "dual attitude to the geat sea of life" without which "one
starved" and in which "one drowned" (37). And for James Wise, in "The Floating World
of Lambert Strether," in Arlingtonﬂraﬂerly 2 (1969) the water imagery signiﬁes that
Strether alternates between "a series of risings and plungings," and ﬂoats or dliﬁs
passively through the action, having been launched by it, rather than launching it (109).

5. For a detailed discussion on Strether's meaning-making activities, see Paul
Armstrong's essay on IheAmhassadQLs in Iheﬂhallengmfﬂcmldeunedeersnndmg
WWW (Ithaca and London: Cornell University

Press, 1987). As Armstrong observes, "Chad's transformation raises basic questions about

187

meaning, interpretation, and reality" (67). And as Armstrong argues, bewilderment
provides Strether with the "occasion for exploring the acts of reconﬁguring his world to
which it gives rise" (77).

6. I associate the world of Woollett with rationality, as opposed to imagination,
because it is clearly and obviously governed by sense: It is sensible for Chad to return
home and carry on his father‘s "big brave bouncing business" (96). It is also sensible for
Chad to marry because then he will have children, and thus ensure the perpetuation of the
Newsome line. There is no vagueness about the values of Woollett then. For everything
seems to be clariﬁed and well-planned to carry out the dictates of good sense.

7. Sheila Teahan, IhLRhemlicaLLogimHeanlames (Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995) 2. In her essay on IhaAmbassadnrs. she
argues that Strether's deviation from his ambassadorial mission both ﬁgures and is doubled
by the novel's deviation from its narrative and causal line, a phenomenon that is inherent in
narrative (98). V

8. Millicent Bell, Meaninginﬂenmlames (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1991) 330.

9. The radiant and genial light of imagination has begun to act on Strether, and
make him compose a picture, as it were, even as early as his solitary visit to the
Luxembourg Gardens: "on a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains,
little trees in geen tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at play all sunnily
'composed' together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his impressions seemed truly
to overﬂow" (112).

10. As Julie Rivkin, in "The Logic of Delegation in IheAmhassadors" in PMLA
101.5 (1986) observes, Maria Gostrey's "name falls one consonant short of 'go straight'
and leaves us with the open-ended sound and open path of 'go stray'" (824).

11. On a different or rather contrary note, William R. Goetz, who argues in Henry

lames_and_the_DarkesLAhyss_o£Romance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press,

188

1986) that Strether’s imagination fails and wrecks him, reads this image of the Babes as an
expression of Strether‘s "return to second childhood"(205). But if this is Strether's image,
as the narrator makes abundantly clear, the ironic tone is Strether's own and not the
narrator's. As the image suggests, then, at this point Strether is being ironic about his
imagination's past failure. Goetz uses the image of the Babes as an illustration of James's
encagement of and separation from "the position of the author" that earlier in the novel,
according to Goetz, James encourages his readers to see (205).

12. The awareness that vaguely begins in this moment of watching a watcher
reaches its culminating point in Strether's relationship with Mme de Vionnet. As Carren
Kaston argues in WWW (New Brunswick,
New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984), both Strether and Mme de Vionnet
"recognize each other as other and aﬂirm each other‘s sense of self" (105).

13. According to Tanner, Strether's "progess in Europe" can be regarded as the
passive watcher's "ascent to a balcony" (40). Tanner observes that James is especially
emphatic about Strether’s ascent. But if James is particular about Strether's ascent, he is
equally particular about his protagonist's descent.

14. Susan L- MiZTUChi, Wm
WWI (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988)
17.

15. Michael Wutz, "The Word and the Self in Wars," Style 25.1
(1991): 94-95.

16. Quoted ﬁ'om Keats's letter to his brothers George and Thomas, dated 21
December, 1817; taken from WW5, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman
(London: Oxford University Press, 1947) 72.

17. Paul G. Beidler, in W
WWW: (B. O, Canada: University of Victoria, 1993)
85.

189

18. Armstrong, 97 .

l9. Goetz, 190.

20. Kaston, 90-91.

21. Bell, 326. She also points out that in remaining a man of imagination Strether
remains a man of potentiality despite his coming across as the man who has not lived"
(330). Bell argues that James uses impressionism as "a personal progam of perception
implying an openness to chance and to a multitude of personal impressions as they come,
to a multitude of possible responses" (333).

22. Rivkin, 824.

23. But as J. Hillis Miller argues in "Narrative and History," in ELH 41.3 (1974),
James shows his awareness that "Historians have always known that ["the narrating of an
historical sequence in one way or another involves a constructive, interpretative, ﬁctive
act," and thus that] history and the narrative of history never wholly coincide" (461). As a
contrast to Mrs. Newsome, Strether has come to realize that the search for pure history is
an unrealizable goal, and thus that the narrative of history is dependent on the imaginative
faculty. Early in the novel he looks at the site of the palace of the Tuileries and, as he tries
to remember the palace, what strikes him is an "irremediable void" (111). The gap that
history opens up for him is "irremediable" despite his memory. His "historic sense,"
conﬁ'onted with an irrevocable gap, thus resorts to the "play" of his fancy (111). As
Roslyn Jolly observes in W (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993), to enter Europe, for Strether, is to enter "a new territory," which signiﬁes
that he begins to explore "the relations between ﬁction and history" (126). The "historic
sense" is so thoroughly dependent upon the imaginative sense that the only way it can
"freely play" is with the help of the latter: "He ﬁlled out spaces with dim symbols of
scenes" (111). But at this point Strether is not aware of this dependence. This is why it
seems to him that it is the historic sense that does the playing. Thus, when Maria gives him

her interpretation of the story of Marie's past, although the narrator refers to "Miss

190

Gostrey's sharp touch," her interpretation to Strether is "still history" (223). But late in the
novel, after Strether himself has gained insight into the poor use to which Mrs. Newsome
puts her imagination, he becomes aware that the historical voice of Paris is at best "vague"
(475). Thus the narrator writes, "Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of
fancy in connexion with such matters as ...[the voice of Paris] - odd starts of the historic
sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but their intensity" (475). For Strether
to be able to take his glimpse of the catastrophic truth of Mme de Vionnet's own turmoil
of emotions, he has to make an imaginative comparison of her with the historical Mine
Roland. Through this association of a historical character with a ﬁctional character, James
points out that his protagonist represents the reader who realizes the need to exercise the
imaginative faculty. For such a reader realizes that in order to conceive the eﬁ‘ect of a
particular historical event, (s)he has to construct the narrative of the historical personage,
for example, Madame Roland on the scaﬁ‘old, with the imaginative faculty.

24. As Rivkin argues, Wars is a "tale of deviation ﬁ'om authority"
(820).

25. According to Louise K. Barnett, in her essay "Speech in IhLAmhassadnts:
Woollett and Paris as Linguistic Communities," in W163
(1983), the image of the abyss is expressive of the irremediable gaps in knowledge that
words cannot eliminate. These gaps that Barnett mentions remind me of Strether's
metaphoricd "well" that I have mentioned early in this essay, and into which he ﬁnds his
remarks dropping as they increasingly move beyond his reach. In her analysis of the image
of "sore abysses," Barnett asserts that "[a]bysses, always used in the plural for
intensiﬁcation, evokes weighty and complex matters whose properties to some extent
exclude verbalization"; and thus, words in the Jamesian universe "can only point to the
void, the sore spot, and then fall silent" (227).

26. At the risk of stretching interpretation to over-interpretation, I would like to

point out that Strether's name, even if a little faintly and vaguely, is associated with the

191

word ether, and thus is suggestive of the celestial. For if we break away the ﬁrst three
letters of his name ﬁ'om the rest we get "ether". It is interesting to note in this connection
that, after he is joined by little Bilham in Gloriani's garden where he has been rather
unceremoniously dropped by Mme de Vionnet, Strether gives the young man the
impression that "if he had been overturned at all, he had been overturned into the upper
air, the sublimer element with which he had an aﬁnity and in which he might be trusted a
while to ﬂoat" (214; my emphasis).

27 . As Teahan argues, Strether’s "revolution" indicates his "inherent deviation
ﬁ'om his appointed task" (97).

28. Pierre A Walker, "Reading the Beme Bears in the End of James's 111:
Ambassadors." ModernlianguageSmdies 22.2 (1992): 13. For Walker, although Strether
learns to comprehend "the duality of human nature and society," which enables him to
"leave Paris with a far more complete understanding of the world and society" than the
one with which he comes, what he receives ﬁom his underStanding is a questionable gain
(6,13).

29. Allen F. Stein, "Lambert Strether's Circuitous Journey: Motifs of Internalized
Quest and Circularity in IheAmhassadors." ESQ 22.4 (1976): 251.

30. Adeline Tintner, "A Source for James's IhtLAmbassadnm in Holbein's The
Ambassadors (1533)," MW ed. Lyall H. Powers (Ann Arbor:
U.M.I. Research Press, 1988) 143. According to Tintner, as "death is hidden in
[Holbein's] picture, so it is in James's novel... Death behind the idea of carpediem stalks
the book" (141). The suggestion of death certainly occurs in the suggestions of decay and
loss, but these occur not so much in continuation as in alternation with the suggestions of
gowth and gain.

31. Kaston, 95-97.

32. Nicola Bradbury, WW (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1979) 67. On a different note, Leland S. Person, in "Strether's 'Penal Form': The Pleasure

of Imaginative Surrender," in

andmmsnfLangmgeandLiteramre 23.1 (1987), argues that James' s protagonist builds
"punishment into his very experience of imaginative pleasure," and prefers relations that

 

are imaginary rather than actual; and therefore, in returning home with the image of Maria
Gostrey's oﬁ‘er, and thus "in not getting 'anything' for himself, ...[Strether] can have his
pleasure and be punished for it too" (29,40).

33. Rivkin, 820.

34. Richard Hathaway, in "Ghosts at the Windows: Shadow and Corona in The
Ambassadors," in W 18.1 (1997), argues that mirrors are
"obscuring-revealing," for they veil and disclose "absence and presence, identity and non-
identity" (87).

35. Allen W. Menton, "Typical Tales of Paris: The Function of Reading in The
Ambassadors," Hennrlameaﬁerdm 15 (1994): 287. According to Menton, Strether ﬁnds
his past when he turns away "from the Paris of literary mediation and begins to experience
Paris directly" (287 ). Menton explains that "the volumes of French literature that
...[Strether] has been reading since [his ﬁrst] trip [to Paris] have colored his view of the
city so thoroughly that the Paris in which he hopes to rediscover his lost youth is largely a
product of that reading - a literary and mythological Paris" (286). But one wonders how
far Strether pursues French literature when he returns home ﬁ'om his ﬁrst visit. Certainly
in his youth Strether bought books with geat ardor, meaning to devote himself to a
serious study of French literature. But these books have become "soiled" for reasons other
than ﬁequent handling: "They were still somewhere at home, the dozen ["lemon-coloured
volumes"] - stale and soiled and never sent to the binder; but what had become of the
sharp initiation they represented? They represented now the mere sallow paint on the door
of the temple of taste that he had dreamed of raising up - a structure he had practically

never carried further. Strether's present highest ﬂights were perhaps those in which this

193

lapse ﬁgured to him as a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd moments, his
want moreover of money, of opportunity, of positive dignity" (116-117).

36. Paul Armstrong, "Reading James's Prefaces and Reading James," Henry
mmmmmmmm ed. David McWhirter
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995) 131. Armstrong argues that by
doubling tenses in his ﬁction, James compels his readers simultaneously to perceive the
scene and to engage in "an act of reﬂection that can only occur in a ﬁiture where the
perception it takes as its object is already past" (132). Armstrong also argues that a similar
coupling of tenses occurs in the prefaces as well by which James "foregound[s] and
thematize[s] the temporality of self-consciousness" (132).

37. According to Menton, Strether ﬁnds himself as well as Paris through his own
past (299).

38. Kaston, 99.

39. Teahan, 99. She argues that "Strether aspires to follow a straight path in his
capacity as center of consciousness ...[b]ut ...is condemned to deviation" (99).

40. Ellmann, 112.
41. Rivkin, 829.

CONCLUSION

Throughout this project on the narrative authority in the J amesian center of
consciousness, my aim has been to focus on the reﬂectors' eﬁ‘orts to read and tell stories.
about themselves and their environments with the help of their wondering, interpretive,
and creative imagination. I have tried to show that as a result of their activity as readers of
stories the reﬂectors create meaning and therefore experience perceptual gowth. As
readers of stories they learn to make narrative connections between their interpretations of
events, and thus to work for causal connections, coherence, and purposefulness, that is,
for the creation of coherent epistemological patterns. As a result, even as readers of
stories, because of their acute imagination, the Jamesian reﬂectors learn to develop their
own systems of representation and ﬁguration. And as tellers of stories, these reﬂectors
achieve such imaginative sophistication that their imaginative abilities gow to become
independent of the narrator’s. Also, as these reﬂectors are storytellers who learn to
develop meaning through the relation (narration) of events, so they learn to develop
meaning through their personal relations, and their understanding of the need of such
relations, with others. Thus the watcher in the "house of ﬁction" shows an acute
awareness of "the human scene" (AN 46).

I have chosen my reading of In the Cage as my ﬁrst chapter because of all the
reﬂectors studied here the nameless telegaphist is the only one who does not gow into a
teller of stories, or whose attempt at storytelling remains unsuccessful. This, perhaps, is
why James makes the little post omce more of a cage than a house of ﬁction. Although the
house of ﬁction does not have "hinged doors that open straight upon life, " and therefore

the isolated watchers observe a "show" with their interpretive imagination much like the

194

195

isolated and imaginative telegaphist who sits in "ﬁamed and wired conﬁnement," James
makes her isolation or her sense of isolation ﬁom the human scene more intense - a
difference more in degee than in kind - than that felt by the watchers in the house of
ﬁction. In other words, the house of ﬁction is not so much a cage as a house. Although
James does not make the telegaphist a successﬁrl storyteller, he suggests her potential to
gow into one. For as an "intense observer" she is an acute reader. Thus the telegaphist's
reading of stories ultimately enables her to see that she has herself, in a manner, only tried
to compose sentimental narratives. Consequently, her reading of stories about the
romantic life of Captain Everard ultimately brings perceptual reﬁnement in her life, and
enables her to move beyond the cage of commonness. Thus, although she does not
develop into a storyteller, she continues to develop as an acute reader of stories. Therefore
she learns to exert the narrative authority which the third-person narrator of this novella
exercises. For, as James demonstrates, she develops the narrator‘s ability of representation.
Thus In the Cage is the only piece of ﬁction studied here that does not show the reﬂectors
narrative authority at the expense of the narrator’s. In other words, this novella is the only
one in which the reﬂectors narrative authority does not result in a reduction of the
narrator's narrative authority.

The second chapter in this project, which is on "The Jolly Corner," and which
shows that the arrangement of my readings of the four pieces of J ames's ﬁction is after all
more topical than chronological, is obviously connected with the ﬁrst chapter in that the
reﬂector in this short story, Spencer Brydon, like the telegaphist, seeks a life of
reﬁnement. While the telegaphist, who belongs to the lower classes and therefore is
tormented by her socioeconomic plight, desires to create meaning through reﬁnement in a
life that is stiﬂed by the meaninglessness of poverty and coarseness, Brydon, who belongs
to the upper classes and is afﬂuent, desires to create reﬁnement through a morally fulﬁlling
aesthetic quest. Thus in Brydon we see a degee of sophistication that we do not notice in

the telegaphist. As a storyteller, Brydon creates a metaphorical narrative of what he might

196

have been if he had never left home and wandered in Europe, because in his actual life he
does not read the coherence of a consistently developing story about a meaningful and
purposeful life and thus about a self-fulﬁlling aesthetic quest. But although Brydon begins
composing the ﬁctional narrative, as it were, he creates a problem for his narrative
authority because of a self-imposed isolation ﬁ'om his environment. Thus he is unable to
complete his ﬁrst attempt at a ﬁgurative narrative about what he might have been. As
James reveals, it is Brydon's relationship with the actual human world, as it is represented
for example by Alice Staverton, that enables him to launch his metaphorical narrative, that
is, make a beginning of it. And it is his realization and rejection of his self-imposed
isolation that enables him to gasp a complete narrative in a complete picture through
which James demonstrates the power of representation and ﬁguration. Thus when Brydon
renounces self-isolation he is able to reassert his narrative authority. As a result, he
ultimately ﬁnds self-ﬁilﬁllment through his aesthetic quest.

As in the ﬁrst two chapters I examine the reﬂectors' exertion of narrative authority
in relation to their quest for reﬁnement, so in the last two chapters I examine it in relation
to their attitudes towards changes in their lives and in their environments. In the third
chapter I discuss the center of consciousness in the ﬁrst volume of The Golden Bowl,
represented by the protagonist, Amerigo, as more resistant than receptive to changes.
Thus, although he is capable of reading a new story that takes the place of an old one, he
tends to ignore the changes that cause an old story to give way to a new one. As a result,
late in the ﬁrst volume the imagery he creates, and the story he creates through the
imagery, break into irremediable incoherence and inconsistency. Consequently, he creates
a serious problem in the exertion of his narrative authority. It seems to me that this is why
James designates Amerigo as the center of consciousness of the ﬁrst rather than of the
second volume. For as a reader and teller of stories, Amerigo demonstrates the initial
rather than the advanced stages of the exertion of narrative authority. Through the

reﬂector of the second volume, however, James shows the continual development of the

197

center of consciousness's exertion of narrative authority. Maggie Verver’s intensely
contemplative imagination enables her to create and sustain her imagery, to run a narrative
thread not simply through Amerigo's imagery, but also to read the old story of his
meaningful relationship with Charlotte Stant, and to register and examine changes in her
own life and in her environment. Consequently, she exercises the narrative authority that
enables Amerigo to make use of his own interpretive imagination instead of depending on
another's, and her, as a powerful storyteller, to replace the old equilibrium of the two
couples with a new equilibrium, and thus to change an old story into a new one.
Consequently, through Maggie, James implicitly suggests that the reﬂectors imagination is
capable of evolving beyond the narrator‘s.

In The Ambassadors, however, as I see it, the author‘s suggestion that the
reﬂector's imaginative abilities evolve beyond the narrator‘s is most clearly revealed. This
is why J arnes shows such a marked concern for Lambert Strether's imagination, and why I
have chosen my reading of this novel as the fourth and ﬁnal chapter in this project. As a
result of the gowth in his imagination, Strether learns to read and tell stories about his
environment, and comes to realize that gowth always suggests change. Consequently, the
exercise of narrative authority enables him to ﬁnd the story of his own life, which is a story
of change, and also to ﬁnd his relation with others. Thus he comes to exert the narrative
authority that enables him to make narrative connections between his past, present, and
future. My choice of this particular arrangement of my chapters has also been determined
by the point that, unlike the reﬂector examined in my second chapter, and unlike one of
the reﬂectors in my third, as a storyteller Strether does not ever experience any loss of
narrative authority. The gowth in his imaginative consciousness enables him to gadually
enhance his narrative authority. Perhaps it is because of this special focus on the subject of
a changing gowing imagination, and notable success with the technique of the center of
consciousness through Strether that James considers The Ambassadors "as, ﬁ'ankly, quite

the best 'all round,‘ of my productions" (AN 309).

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